Pathways to Higher Education

Internet, Society & Space in Indian Cities

Pratyush Shankar — 2016-06-29T09:41:25Z

The monograph on Internet, Society and Space in Indian Cities, by Pratyush Shankar, is an entry into debates around making of IT Cities and public planning policies that regulate and restructure the city spaces in India with the emergence of Internet technologies. Going beyond the regular debates on the modern urban, the monograph deploys a team of students from the field of architecture and urban design to investigate how city spaces – the material as well as the experiential – are changing under the rubric of digital globalisation. Placing his inquiry in the built form, Shankar manoeuvres discourse from architecture, design, cultural studies and urban geography to look at the notions of cyber-publics, digital spaces, and planning policy in India. The findings show that the relationship between cities and cyberspaces need to be seen as located in a dynamic set of negotiations and not as a mere infrastructure question. It dismantles the presumptions that have informed public and city planning in the country by producing alternative futures of users’ interaction and mapping of the emerging city spaces.

Chapter 1 (City, Technology and Cyberspace) talks about the presence of a new technology of information communication in the society and how it can possibly impact cities in terms of their material production and other cultures. Does the rush of Information Technology in our society and space mark a radical shift in a manner in which cities will develop or is it a part of a larger continuous process that started with the Industrial revolution and reorganization of cities?

Chapter 2 (The Idea of Space) examines that cities not only provide the necessary environment for such a change but also readjust their own spatial configurations. It aims to understand the nature of such transformation both from the perspective of the change in material culture and in imagination of cities due to the advent of Internet related technologies.

Chapter 3 (The Imagination) looks at the fact that city is not only lived in but also imagined. Representation of the city and its part play an important role in shaping the imagination. The imagination is one that often collapses the past with present and future. The perception of the city is as much mediated by the collective imagination (as well as individual interpretation of the same) as by our experience of the space itself.

Chapter 4 (The Transformation) examines the city restructuring process. Cities like nations are now competing for investments from private corporate. The networked cities of India, Bangalore and Gurgaon have been studied further to understand the phenomenon of this IT related restructuring from the point of view of its transformed physical morphology and its repercussion on the nature of its public places.

Pratyush concludes by saying that cities seem to derive their identities with two kinds of imagination structures when it comes to space. First and foremost is the imagination resulting from the meta narratives of mythology, religious belief structure, position of humans in this world. The other imagination structure is the one, which engages with the land, folk and the immediate cultural practices of the community group. He further elaborates that the city restructuring process in India is supposed to symbolize the existence of the information technology but it is really real estate and economic opportunism more than anything else.

Download the monograph: PDF (9.8 MB)

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/internet-society-space

Digital Native: Do not go Gently into the Good Night

nishant — 2017-03-03T16:07:36Z

If there’s a lesson to be learned from the resistance to the Trump administration, it is this — patriotism is not a feeling, it is an action.

The article was published by the Indian Express on February 9, 2017.

It was that time of the year. We wore our patriotism on our sleeves, painted our faces in the colours of the national flag, proclaimed our joy for the republic we live in. We performed our proud presence as nation-loving citizens on the social web, while ignoring the ominous fact that the chief guest at the celebration of our constitutional existence represented a country where lashes and stoning to death are still legal punishments. Be that as it may, it is undeniable that our peer-to-peer networks helped catalyse and stir the pride in our Constitution that enshrines us with some of our most basic, fundamental, and human rights, for life and living.

As Republic Day recedes from our memory, let me warn you that the future of our social media feeds is grim. As we consume the impending Trumpocalypse, we cannot but realise that we have not only been there, but also done that. A government which does not communicate freely with the press: check. A discourse that supports messages of hate against specific religions and provides “alternative facts” in our history books: check. Politicians spreading fake news and populations being swayed by it: check.

For all our Amreeka-loving souls, it might be a grim reassurance that we are ahead in the game and the United States of Trumpistan is merely catching up. The social web might seem to mimic the trend, where a problem becomes a problem only when it hits the developed countries in the north, but it is good for us to realise that the doom and gloom that these trends are forecasting are already the realities that we live in.

However, there is one major difference that is worth noting. In the USA, even as this orange-hazed madness unfolds, there are people marching, protesting, and fighting to defend the annihilation of their democratic, constitutional rights. Their patriotism is not going to wait till Independence Day, but is right now on the streets, flooding the social web, inundating airports, and demanding in unprecedented ways, the recognition and the defence of their rights. While there isn’t much to be said about a nation that had an electoral system that allowed for a populist to come into power, there is something that we need to drive home —patriotism is not a feeling, it is an action.

And so, if this Republic Day, you shared, consumed, viewed, read and rejoiced, even one item of patriotic impulse — even if you merely retweeted Kiran Bedi’s photoshopped image of world monuments adorned in the tricolour —here is my challenge for you.

Before the memory of patriotism and the pride of the Constitution fade away completely, we are going to head into Valentine’s Day. It is a day that is fraught with tension in India. On the one hand, there will be the sceptre of consumerist capitalism that will wear us down with the sales, the dances, the parties, and an aggressive market to sell, sell, sell, everything that they can, pretending that true love is in buying gifts. On the other hand, we will have the righteous people who even their mothers might find difficult to love, standing on the streets with weapons and force, intimidating people on the streets and slut-shaming women who they will deem too “Western” to be allowed to live their lives in peace.

Whether you believe in the fabricated spirit of St Valentine or not, whether you want to join the candy-flavoured pink brigade or not, whether or not you participate in the dhamaka shopping frenzy of the season — here is your chance to put your patriotism to practice.

One of the most beautiful expressions of our Constitution is in our right to life, dignity, and self-determination. It means that as long as our actions do not harm and hurt others intentionally, it is our right to live, love, and express our life and love in ways that we determine worthy. So, as people around the country gear up to celebrate Valentine’s Day, and hooligans across the states polish their trishuls and lathis to obstruct these celebrations, bring your patriotism to the streets. Go and stand in solidarity with these people, defending their right to live their life without fear and intimidation. I am offering you the #RightToLove to show your support of people who want to take that brief moment from humdrum lives to find and experience love and longing, and if you see any acts of intimidation or violence, whisk out your phone and capture the event, share it on social media, make an intervention in person and fight against those who insist on violating our Constitution, and defend our country from the forces within.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-nishant-shah-february-9-2017-digital-native-do-not-go-gently-into-the-good-night

Digital native: Who will watch the watchman?

nishant — 2017-03-03T16:18:50Z

The state mining its citizens as data and suspending rights to privacy under the rhetoric of national security is alarming.

The article was published in the Indian Express on February 19, 2017

I want you to start getting slightly uncomfortable right now. Because even as you read this, your emails are being read without your knowledge. Your social media network has been accessed by an unknown agent. Somebody is getting hold of your financial transactions and your credit card purchases, and creating a profile of your spending habits. Somebody pretending to be you is checking the naked pictures you might have backed up in your private cloud.

Somewhere, the profiles that you created for your dating apps are under scrutiny. Your Google search history is slowly being browsed by people who now know what you searched for last Friday at 3.30 am when you just couldn’t find sleep. Your WhatsApp texts, including that long sexting session with your ex, is now being stored in some other memory.The false account that you had created on Twitter to troll the world, is now linked to all your other IDs. The LinkedIn connections you sent to a rival company in search for a better job, are now available for others to find.

I wish that I was only presenting a hypothetical dystopia to warn us about the future of privacy. But, I am not. Because, the future is already here and it is slowly unfolding in front of you. We often think of the Internet as a secure system, mumbling things about encryption and passwords, imagining that if so many people are using it, then it must surely be safe. And it is true, that largely most of our electronic communication on the digital circuits is secure, or, at least, not easily vulnerable to vicious attacks.

Every time we hear about hackers intercepting sensitive information in databases, we are assured that it was a one-time exceptional case, and that forensic investigations are being conducted to keep our data safe. The digital security industry is indeed working hard to make it increasingly difficult for people with malicious intent to actually read and manipulate our data that we secure with passwords, fingerprints, and encryption keys that become more complex and robust.

However, the biggest concern around privacy, in the Internet of Things, is not about these cat-and-mouse games of data breaches and theft. Instead, perhaps, the biggest act of data theft and interception is conducted in full public view, with our consent. This happens when we download apps, use single user verification accounts and join free public hotspots, allowing our data to be freely captured by unseen actors.

The corporate mining of human users is not the only scenario in this landscape. In the recent reality TV edition of the US politics, they have just announced that border control in the US can now demand anybody to hand over their digital devices, passwords to email and social media accounts, and access to all their digital information in order to gain entry into the country. Or, in other words, you can be as secure as you like, but if the government wants, they will get that information from you as a price of entry into the country. You don’t need the NSA when you can just walk to the person and ask them to hand over this information.

Closer home in Digital India, things are not better. The Aadhaar project has failed to address data privacy questions. The data that we have voluntarily given to Aadhaar can be used to create a massive surveillance system that sells our data for profits and transactions to private companies. Similarly, in the post-demonetisation move, as we all went cashless, we increased our digital footprint in an ecosystem that has almost no safeguards to protect you from people knowing about your purchases at the chemist shop last weekend.

As we connect more online, and more devices are linked to our user profiles, we continue to leak and bleed data which violates the very core of what we consider our private selves. When we learned about the market exploiting our private data, we thought that the state would be the watchman. As the states start being run as markets, we now have a new question: who shall watch the watchman?

The new interest of the state in mining its citizens as data and suspending our rights to privacy under the rhetoric of national security and interest is alarming. The state now thinks of our private data as capital. We need mechanisms to protect ourselves from the predatory impulses of the new information states, and while we might not have remedies, we do need to start the conversation now to safeguard our futures from the war against privacy.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-nishant-shah-february-19-2017-digital-native-who-will-watch-the-watchman

Figures of Learning: The Conditional Artist

Tara Kelton — 2015-11-13T05:42:25Z

As part of its Making Methods for Digital Humanities project, CIS-RAW organized two consultations on new figures of learning in the digital context. For a proposed journal issue on the theme of ‘bodies of knowledge’ which draws upon these conversations, participants were invited to write short sketches on these figures of learning. This abstract by Tara Kelton explores the conditional artist, and the outcomes of inserting chance in the realization of art work through the use of new multimedia and digital technologies.

For five weeks George Korsmit and his assistants worked from a platform on a mobile scaffold to create this largescale mural. The corner points of each quadrilateral and the colors used to fill it in were determined within specific parameters by throwing dice.

This annotated visual essay presents the strategy in which artists provide instructions/parameters for the creation of artworks, to be executed by hired labour / users and describes how contemporary practitioners have employed this strategy across new technologies and webbased services such as Amazon’s Mechanical Turks, YouTube and Facebook.

By inserting chance into the realization of artworks, a distance is created between the artist and the product, and the artist cannot predict a precise outcome this results in new, unexpected visual forms and potentially infinite variation. The relationship between human gesture and interface is inverted rather than using a mouse to command software interfaces, instead, computational parameters direct human gestures. The essay will also demonstrate how instructional art strategies are used as tools for critiquing systems of power, both on and offline, drawing attention to the invisible labor that powers these systems, using their own mechanisms.

Visual examples include both the historical and contemporary, from the work of early conceptual and computer artists (Sol Lewitt, John Baldessari) to present day art and design practitioners (Studio Moniker, IOCOSE).

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/the-conditional-artist

Studying Internet in India: Selected Abstracts

sumandro — 2015-08-28T06:53:33Z

We received thirty five engaging abstracts in response to the call for essays on 'Studying Internet in India.' Here are the ten selected abstracts. The final essays will be published from June onwards.

Deva Prasad M - 'Studying the Internet Discourse in India through the Prism of Human Rights'

Exploring Internet from the perspective of human rights gives rise to the multitude of issues such as right to privacy, freedom of expression, accessibility. Pertinent socio-political and legal issues related to Internet which was widely debated upon in the past one year in India includes lack of freedom of expression on Internet and Section 66A of Information Technology Act, 2000. The recent net neutrality debate in India has also evoked deliberation about the right of equal accessibility to Internet and to maintain Internet as a democratic space. The repercussions of ‘Right to be Forgotten’ law of European Union also had led to debate of similar rights in Indian context. Interestingly all these issues have an underlying thread of human right perspective connecting them and need pertinent deliberation from human rights perspective.

This paper is an attempt to understand and analyze theses issues from the human rights angle and also how they have contributed in evolving an understanding and perspective amongst the digitally conscious Indian’s to ensure the democratic nature of “Internet” is perceived. Moreover, analysis of these three issues would also help in emphasizing upon the need for a right-based approach in studying Internet in India.

Dibyajyoti Ghosh - 'Indic Scripts and the Internet'

Whereas the status of the internet in India is similar to the status of the internet in similar economies with low-penetration and a primarily mobile-based future, an alphabetically diverse nation such as India has its added worries. Whereas the 1990s saw an overdomination of English given the linguistic communities which were developing the world of computers and the world of the internet, by 2015, some of the disparity with offline linguistic patterns has been reduced. However, for Indic scripts, much less development has taken place. If one is studying the internet in India, chances are one is studying it in English.

What does this hold for the future of these Indic scripts? Given the multilingual skills of Indian school-goers and the increasing amount of daily reading time of those connected to the internet (which is somewhere between 12% and 20% of the population) being devoted to reading on the internet, chances are reading is increasingly in English. In this essay, I shall attempt to study the effects this has on the internet population of India, some of which are as follows.

The kind of mimetic desire it causes
The degneration in spelling skills caused due to transliteration
The effacement of non-digitised Indic verbal texts

Divij Joshi - 'The Internet in the Indian Judicial Imagination'

The first mention of the 'Internet' in the vocabulary of Indian judicial system was a fleeting reference to its radical capability to allow access to knowledge. In one of its most recent references, it expounded upon and upheld the idea of the Internet as a radical tool for free expression, announcing its constitutional significance for free speech.

The judicial imagination of the Internet – the understanding of its capabilities and limitations, its actors and constituents, as reflected in the judgements of Indian courts – plays a major role in shaping the Internet in India, both reflecting and defining conceptions of the Internet and its relationship with society, law, and public policy.

This essay is an attempt to use legal and literary theory to study the archives of judicial decisions, tracing the history of the Internet in India through the lens of judicial trends, and also to look at how the judiciary has defined its own role in relation to the Internet. It attempts a vital study of how courts in India have conceptualized and understood the Internet, and how these conceptions have, in turn, impacted the influence of the Internet on Indian society.

Ipsita Sengupta

The proposed essay will make observations of a specific kind of conversation that takes place on the social media platform of YouTube. The conclusive argument is imagined along questions of high versus low culture, as described below.

Under study are two objects- one, particular YouTube videos which play Rabindra-Sangeet, i.e. songs penned and composed in the late 19- early 20th centuries by the Bengali writer and artist Rabindranath Tagore, the body of work which today has become a genre of Indian music; and the second, comments that these videos receive from users of the site.

Visuals of YouTube song videos of Rabindra-Sangeet are of many kinds. So are renditions, with solitary or duet or band performances, and with varying pace and instrumental accompaniment.

The videos which have visuals from contemporary cinema, like images of urban youth, and the remixed renditions have often been found to receive comments which reflect/ reveal hurt sentiments of people trying to preserve some kind of sanctity of Rabindra-Sangeet, comments which state how the ethics of presenting the genre have been violated, via their notation and design, by either makers of the film in the song’s incorporation, or by the way young pop stars have been placed in particular montages.

Some examples:

In such a scenario, YouTube as medium of user-generated expression becomes interesting to analyse individual and group dynamics- given the space for commenting (below the video), and statistical data such as “Likes”, “Dislikes”, and “Views”. The debate here is that in Tagore’s “Nationalism”, when he himself is seen to have an imagination of the human race beyond patriotic groupings and consequent othering, does this apparent need to avoid “insulting” his compositions by preserving an intangible art form in a particular way, become then a type of jingoism of region or identity? And what is this Benjaminian “aura” of the “original” that listeners look for in their experience of these videos?

Laird Brown - 'Dharamsala Networked'

Three hours after regulations governing public access to WiFi in India were changed in 2005 the first router went up in Dharamsala. It was homemade, open source, and eventually, “monkey proof.” Something unimaginable had happened: high-speed Internet access in one of India’s most difficult physical geographies. Dharamsala has also become one of India's interesting information networks and has a burgeoning, unlikely 'tech scene’. But is it so unlikely?

Since 1959 Dharamsala has been home to the Dalai Lama, the Tibetan people and, government in exile. This single, significant incident possibly set in motion a number of factors that made it possible for the mountain-town to become a political, global, communications. However, much like the rest of India, the region struggles for human and environmental rights against fractured ideas of 'development'. This essay will draw on archives and interviews to unpack this microcosmic tale of Internet access, its histories and economics and the factors at play in shaping it - mundane and maverick, familiar and outlier.

Maitrayee Deka - 'WhatsApp Economy'

Everyone around us is connected to the Internet through some or other electronic devices, phones, laptops, and tablets. However, not everyone use Internet for the same purpose. Through an ethnographic account of the usage of WhatsApp messages by the traders in three electronic bazaars in Delhi, Palika Bazaar, Nehru Place and Lajpat Rai Market, we see how Internet on the phone is used predominantly for business purpose. The paper seeks to examine how Whatsapp messages, which are for most of the users a medium for social communication, for the traders in Delhi, become a mode to establish business contact with their counterparts in China. From sharing of pictures of new tools to quoting prices of different products, Whatsapp messages become the lifeline of what many has termed as ‘globalization from below’. This paper argues what has started as economic exchanges through Whatsapp messages may start a new political alliance of similar mass markets in Asia. With the electronic bazaars in Delhi facing stiff competition from formal business actors both online and offline, the WhatsApp messages that is a space of new innovations and trade alliances could sustain the mass markets in India.

Purbasha Auddy - 'Citizens and their Internet'

Suddenly it seems internet data package on mobile phones is the reply to the problems in India. As mobile phones remain with us most of the time, it is as if we are ready to face the world if our mobile phones have a data package. Yes, several television commercials in India are gleefully harping on the notes of knowledge, empowerment and freedom. Moreover, internet is being identified as a virtual institution.

The essay proposes to look into those advertisements which talk about the internet to promote data packages, mobile phones or apps. Through this, the essay firstly, would like to construct the idea of the internet using the Indian citizen who is depicted as smart and almost infallible. Secondly, on the other hand, the essay would analyse how an affirmative and constructive view of using the internet in the minds of citizens has been generated by these advertisements, like the virtual world of the internet can save you from any drastic situation.

Advertisements are creative constructs, which have a strong aptitude to entice target consumers. While studying the internet in India, studying the ‘texts’ of Indian advertisements which refer to the act of ‘consuming’ the internet could result in an interesting study.

Sailen Routray - 'The Many Lives and Sites of Internet in Bhubaneswar'

Those of us who have jumped or meandered across to the wrong (or perhaps the right) side of thirty by now, first came to consume internet in what were called, and are still called, cyber cafes or internet cafes. Their numbers in big Indian cities is dwindling because of the increasing ubiquity of smartphone, and netbooks and data cards. The cyber café seems to be inexorably headed the way of the STD booth in the geography of large Indian cities. The present paper is a preliminary step towards capturing some of the experience of running and using internet cafes. With ethnographic fieldwork with cyber café owners and internet users in these cafes in the Chandrasekharpur area of Bhubaneswar (where the largest section of the computer industry in the state of Odisha is located), this paper tries to capture experiences that lie at the interstices of ‘objects’ and spaces - experiences that are at the same time a history of the internet as well as a personal history of the city.

Sarah McKeever - 'Quantity over Quality: Social Media and the New Class System in India'

From the humblest mobile phones to the most sophisticated computers, the Internet is everywhere and nowhere in India. The boundaries, the contours of the space remain nebulous and opaque. When engaging with social media in urban India in particular, we are bound to the conventions of corporations which demand quantity over quality creating a new class system of the Internet: those who are “active” – and therefore a “better” user – and those who have seemingly failed to keep up with the demands of the medium, buried in the ever‐growing noise and chaos. The creation of a new class system on the Internet, based on Western corporate desire for data, has shaped who is seen and heard on the Internet in India.

Based on fieldwork in New Delhi which examines the impact of the Internet on offline social movements – including the anti corruption movement in 2011 and the Delhi Rape Case in 2012 – I will argue that the study of the Internet in India can reinforce Western corporate conceptions of how to use the Internet properly among various users involved in the movements. By challenging these preconceptions, this essay will engage with issues of Western corporate notions of Internet use and how we engage with and find participants, how we evaluate what is “good” use of the Internet, and the creation of a new class system on the Internet in India.

Smarika Kumar - 'Governing Speech on the Internet: Transforming the Public Sphere through Policymaking'

In the privatised spaces of the World Wide Web and the internet, how does one make sense of speech? Should speech in such a space be understood as the product of a marketplace of ideas? Or should its role in democratic participation be recognised by contextualising the internet as part of the Habermasian public sphere? These questions have interesting implications for the regulation of speech on the internet, as they employ different principles in understanding speech. Recent scholarship has argued for the benefits of employing the public sphere approach to the internet and thus recognising its democratic potential. But taking into account that all speech is inherently made in private spaces on the internet, the application of this approach is far from simple.

This creates a tension between the marketplace of ideas and the public sphere approaches to speech on the internet in policymaking. I propose to explore how legal and regulatory mechanisms manage these tensions by creating governance frameworks for the internet: I argue that through the use of policy and regulation, the private marketplace of the internet is sought to be reined in and reconciled to the public sphere, which is mostly represented through legislations governing the internet. I propose that this less-than-perfect reconciliation then manages to modify the very idea of the public sphere itself in the Indian context, by infusing participation of the "other" on the internet through indirect means.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/studying-internet-in-india-selected-abstracts

April 2015 Bulletin

praskrishna — 2015-05-31T04:29:24Z

Newsletter for the month of April below.

We are happy to share with you the fourth issue of the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) newsletter (April 2015). The past editions of the newsletter can be accessed at http://cis-india.org/about/newsletters.

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Highlights
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CIS received 35 engaging abstracts in response to the call for essays on 'Studying Internet in India'. The final essays will be published from June onwards. The ten selected abstracts can be read at http://cis-india.org/raw/studying-internet-in-india-selected-abstracts/ .

CIS submitted its comments to the National Informatics Centre on April 30, 2015 bringing to notice the negligible progress on the front for making Indian government websites conform to the notified standards, and gave recommendations to take the initiatives forward.
Nehaa Chaudhari has prepared a consolidated report that tracks the development of India's National IPR Policy and the requests by CIS to the Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion under the RTI Act and responses elicited from the Department.

Institute of Odia Studies and Research organised 2nd National Language Conference beginning on March 30, 2015 and ending on April 2, 2015 at the Institute of Physics, Bhubaneswar. This conference was organised in collaboration with the Department of Tourism and Culture. Subhashish Panigrahi presented a paper in Odia language in this conference as part of a panel discussion related to Odia language computing.

Sunil Abraham's article titled "Shreya Singhal and 66A" was published in Economic and Political Weekly Vol-L No.15. Vidushi Marda helped in doing the research.

Sunil Abraham in an article in DNA titled " Multiple Aspects Need to be Addressed as the Clamour Grows for Network Neutrality " tells readers that there are four violations of Network Neutrality that are considered particularly egregious.

Jyoti Panday prepared an analysis of the Supreme Court judgement in Shreya Singhal and what it does for intermediary liability in India.
In February 2015, CIS had requested DeitY under RTI Act to provide information clarifying the procedures for blocking in India. The response elicited from DeitY has been published.

CIS sent a joint response to the TRAI Consultation Paper on Regulatory Framework for Over-the-top (OTT) services with scholars from Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad. The response was sent on March 27, 2015.

► Vacancies at CIS

CIS is seeking applications for:

Internship : CIS is providing opportunities for students enrolled in graduate programmes to undertake internship at its offices in Bangalore and Delhi. Eligible candidates are welcome to participate in our internship programme.

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Accessibility and Inclusion
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Under a grant from the Hans Foundation we are doing two projects. The first project is on creating a national resource kit of state-wise laws, policies and programmes on issues relating to persons with disabilities in India. CIS in partnership with CLPR (Centre for Law and Policy Research) compiled the National Compendium of Policies, Programmes and Schemes for Persons with Disabilities (29 states and 6 union territories). The publication has been finalised and is being printed. The draft chapters and the quarterly reports can be accessed on the project page. The second project is on developing text-to-speech software for 15 Indian languages. The progress made so far in the project can be accessed here.

►NVDA and eSpeak

# Monthly Updates

April 2015 Report (Suman Dogra; April 30, 2015).

# Language Testing Reports

Hindi Language (Nirmita Narasimhan; April 10, 2015).
Gujarati Language (Nirmita Narasimhan; April 16, 2015).
Oriya Language (Nirmita Narasimhan; April 30, 2015).

►Other

# Submission

Comments to the GIGW (Nirmita Narasimhan; April 30, 2015).

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Access to Knowledge
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As part of the Access to Knowledge programme we are doing two projects. The first one (Pervasive Technologies) under a grant from the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) is for research on the complex interplay between pervasive technologies and intellectual property to support intellectual property norms that encourage the proliferation and development of such technologies as a social good. The second one (Wikipedia) under a grant from the Wikimedia Foundation is for the growth of Indic language communities and projects by designing community collaborations and partnerships that recruit and cultivate new editors and explore innovative approaches to building projects.

# Blog Entries

Methodology: Patent Landscaping in the Indian Mobile Device Market (Rohini Lakshané; November 10, 2014). The list of standards and specifications found in sub-USD-100 Internet-enabled mobile phones sold in India" (Annexure 2 in the post) has been updated .
Conference on Standards Settings Organizations (SSO) and FRAND, NLSIU (Rohini Lakshané; April 5, 2015).
National IPR Policy Series: RTI Requests by CIS to DIPP + DIPP Responses (Nehaa Chaudhari; April 15, 2015).
Pervasive Technologies Project Working Document Series: Literature Review on IPR in Mobile app development (Anubha Sinha; April 29, 2015).

Media Coverage

CIS gave inputs for the following:

One reason startups are moving out of India (Evelyn Fok and Varun Aggarwal; The Times of India; April 10, 2015). This was also mirrored in Economic Times .
Indian businesses crave IP certainty, but better patent values are tempting them overseas (IAM Magazine; April 28, 2015).

►Wikipedia

As part of the project grant from the Wikimedia Foundation we have reached out to more than 3500 people across India by organizing more than 100 outreach events and catalysed the release of encyclopaedic and other content under the Creative Commons (CC-BY-3.0) license in four Indian languages (21 books in Telugu, 13 in Odia, 4 volumes of encyclopaedia in Konkani and 6 volumes in Kannada, and 1 book on Odia language history in English).

# Participation in Event

2nd National Language Conference, Bhubaneswar (Organized by Institute of Odia Studies and Research; Institute of Physics; Bhubaneswar; March 30 - April 2, 2015). This conference was organised in collaboration with the Department of Tourism and Culture. Subhashish Panigrahi presented a paper in Odia language in this conference as part of a panel discussion related to Odia language computing.

# Blog Entries

Hindustani Language: We Are Wikipedia (Syed Muzamiluddin; April 10, 2015).
ଓଡ଼ିଆ ଭାଷା ପାଇଁ ଡିଜିଟାଲ ଅସୁବିଧା (Subhashish Panigrahi; April 15, 2015).
Wikipedia Campus at Oxford College (Subhashish Panigrahi; April 28, 2015).

# News and Media Coverage

CIS-A2K team gave its inputs to the following media coverage:

Odia waits for Google Translate debut - Nine Indian languages available (Anwesha Ambaly; Telegraph; April 6, 2015).
Now you can search Google in Kannada, in your handwriting (Apurva Venkat; Bangalore Mirror; April 18, 2015).

►Openness

# Event Co-organized

NASA International Open Data Challenge 2015 (Co-organized by CIS and Team Indus; Bangalore; April 11-12, 2015).

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Internet Governance
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As part of its research on privacy and free speech, CIS is engaged with two different projects. The first one (under a grant from Privacy International and International Development Research Centre (IDRC)) is on surveillance and freedom of expression (SAFEGUARDS). The second one (under a grant from MacArthur Foundation) is on studying the restrictions placed on freedom of expression online by the Indian government.

►Freedom of Expression

India's Apex Court in a landmark decision struck down section 66A of the IT Act. The judgment provided great relief for advocates of freedom of speech on the Internet. The development attracted lots of media coverage to which CIS gave its inputs:

# Articles

Shreya Singhal and 66A (Sunil Abraham; Economic and Political Weekly Vol-L No.15; April 11, 2015). Vidushi Marda helped in doing the research.
Don't Do Nothing. Take a Stand on Net Neutrality. (T. Vishnu Vardhan; NDTV; April 13, 2015).
Multiple Aspects Need to be Addressed as the Clamour Grows for Network Neutrality (Sunil Abraham; DNA; April 16, 2015).
The Hazards of a Non-neutral Internet (Geetha Hariharan; April 18, 2015). A modified version of the blog entry was published as an article titled " A must for free speech " in the Week.

# Blog Entries

The Supreme Court Judgment in Shreya Singhal and What It Does for Intermediary Liability in India? (Jyoti Panday; April 11, 2015).
DeitY says 143 URLs have been Blocked in 2015; Procedure for Blocking Content Remains Opaque and in Urgent Need of Transparency Measures (Jyoti Panday; April 29, 2015).

# Event

Freedom of Expression in a Digital Age: Effective Research, Policy Formation & the Development of Regulatory Frameworks in South Asia (Organized by Center for Global Communication Studies at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, Observer Research Foundation and CIS; Observer Research Foundation, New Delhi; April 21, 2015).

# Participation in Event

Financial Express hosts #NetNeutralityDebate: 'Price discrimination can be allowed, but not for the same packet of data' (New Delhi; April 24, 2015). Pranesh Prakash participated in the discussion.

►Privacy

# Participation in Event

Privacy International Network Meeting (Organized by Privacy International, UK; April 22 - 23, 2015). Sunil Abraham attended the meeting.

►Miscellaneous

# Announcement

IIGF Recruitment : The National Internet Exchange of India (NIXI) conducted walk-in interviews on May 16, 2015 at NIXI Jasola office, Flat No. 6B, 6th Floor, Uppals M6 Plaza, New Delhi. NIXI sought candidates to fill the posts of Technology Analyst, Policy Analyst, Research Associate and Executive Assistants.

# Participation in Events

Global Conference on Cyberspace 2015 (Co-organized by Dutch Government, City of the Hague and One Conference; The Hague, Netherlands; April 16 - 17, 2015). Sunil Abraham was a panelist. He also participated in an expert roundtable conference .
CII Digital India Summit (Organized by Confederation of Indian Industries; Taj Mahal Hotel and Pragati Maidan, New Delhi; April 21 and 24, 2015). Pranesh Prakash attended the summit.

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News & Media Coverage
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CIS gave its inputs to the following media coverage:

'Smack' the Trolls! (Marianne De Nazareth; The Citizen; March 31, 2015).
The block heads (Sibi Arasu; Hindu Businessline; April 3, 2015).
Smriti Irani brings back focus on voyeurism prevailing in our country (Amrita Madhukalya; DNA; April 6, 2015).
Surveillance rises, privacy retreats (Namrata Acharya; Business Standard; April 12, 2015).
People voice their support for net neutrality, say Internet a utility not a luxury (IBN Live; April 13, 2015).
Net neutrality: Trai receives over 2 lakh mails (Sandhya Soman and Jayanta Deka; April 14, 2015).
Net neutrality: Debate rages on (Surabhi Aggarwal; Business Standard; April 11, 2015)
Net neutrality debate rages (Lalatendu Mishra and Pradeesh Chandran; The Hindu; April 15, 2015).
Net neutrality: Net activism packs a punch (Sandhya Soman; The Times of India; April 19, 2015).
Net Neutrality debate in India: Here are all the arguments you need to know (Indian Express; April 23, 2015).
Freedom struggle 2.0 (Zara Khan; Hindu; April 25, 2015).
Cry, you nasty trolls (Prasun Chaudhari; The Telegraph; April 26, 2015). Net Neutrality: The argument continues (Deepak Ajwani and Debojyoti Ghosh; Forbes India Magazine; April 29, 2015).

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Researchers at Work
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The Researchers at Work (RAW) programme is an interdisciplinary research initiative driven by contemporary concerns to understand the reconfigurations of social practices and structures through the Internet and digital media technologies, and vice versa. It is interested in producing local and contextual accounts of interactions, negotiations, and resolutions between the Internet, and socio-material and geo-political processes:

# Blog Entries

Studying Internet in India: Selected Abstracts - CIS received thirty five engaging abstracts in response to the call for essays on 'Studying Internet in India.' The final essays will be published from June onwards. These are the ten selected abstracts: Studying the Internet Discourse in India through the Prism of Human Rights (by Deva Prasad); Indic Scripts and the Internet (by Dibyajyoti Ghosh); The Internet in the Indian Judicial Imagination (by Divij Joshi); Dharmasala Networked (by Laird Brown); WhatsApp Economy (by Maitrayee Deka); Citizens and their Internet (by Purbasha Auddy); The Many Lives and Sites of Internet in Bhubaneswar (by Sailen Routray); Quantity over Quality: Social Media and the New Class System in India (by Sarah McKeever); Governing Speech on the Internet: Transforming the Public Sphere through Policymaking (by Smarika Kumar).

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Telecom
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CIS is involved in promoting access and accessibility to telecommunications services and resources and has provided inputs to ongoing policy discussions and consultation papers published by TRAI. It has prepared reports on unlicensed spectrum and accessibility of mobile phones for persons with disabilities and also works with the USOF to include funding projects for persons with disabilities in its mandate:

# Submission

Response to TRAI Consultation Paper on Regulatory Framework for Over-the-Top (OTT) Services (Pranesh Prakash; March 27, 2015). The response was sent in March but mirrored on our website recently.

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About CIS
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The Centre for Internet and Society is a non-profit research organization that works on policy issues relating to freedom of expression, privacy, accessibility for persons with disabilities, access to knowledge and IPR reform, and openness (including open government, FOSS, open standards, etc.), and engages in academic research on digital natives and digital humanities.

► Follow us elsewhere

Twitter: https://twitter.com/CISA2K
Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/cisa2k
Visit us at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/India_Access_To_Knowledge
E-mail: a2k@cis-india.org

► Support Us

Please help us defend consumer / citizen rights on the Internet! Write a cheque in favour of 'The Centre for Internet and Society' and mail it to us at No. 194, 2nd 'C' Cross, Domlur, 2nd Stage, Bengaluru - 5600 71.

► Request for Collaboration:

We invite researchers, practitioners, and theoreticians, both organisationally and as individuals, to collaboratively engage with Internet and society and improve our understanding of this new field. To discuss the research collaborations, write to Sunil Abraham, Executive Director, at sunil@cis-india.org. To discuss collaborations on Indic language Wikipedia, write to T. Vishnu Vardhan, Programme Director, A2K, at vishnu@cis-india.org.

CIS is grateful to its primary donor the Kusuma Trust founded by Anurag Dikshit and Soma Pujari, philanthropists of Indian origin for its core funding and support for most of its projects. CIS is also grateful to its other donors, Wikimedia Foundation, Ford Foundation, Privacy International, UK, Hans Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, and IDRC for funding its various projects.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/about/newsletters/april-2015-bulletin

Digital native: You are not alone

nishant — 2017-09-12T13:22:14Z

Away from the guidance of adults, the internet can be a lonely place for youngsters, pushing them towards self-harm.

The article was published in the Indian Express on August 27, 2017.

We have always known that the World Wide Web is a terrifying space. From the vicious rickrolling on Redditt to the lynch mobs on Twitter, we have seen and heard enough to know that when it comes to the social web, nothing is sacred and nobody is safe. As the web exposes the dirty, dangerous, and forbidden desires of our collective depravity, there is a growing concern for the safety of digital natives who come of age online.

Children are taught to identify signs of danger, protect themselves from strangers, and remain alert when alone in public because we know that despite decades of governance, our physical spaces are not free from danger. However, we do not stop children from going out. Instead, we assign signposts and take responsibility to look out for young people who might end up in trouble because of their naiveté or poor judgement.

However, when it comes to the connected web, the youth don’t have the comfort of this buffering adult, who might guide, protect and direct them in difficult situations. The lives of digital natives are so new that most elders in their life do not have a sense of what is happening there. For most digital natives, the foray into the world of connected media is unchartered territory of collective trial and sometimes ruinous error. It puts them in a condition of profound vulnerability.

On the one hand, they are being subjected to incredible risks of bullying, exposure, manipulation and coercion by strangers on the web. On the other hand, they know that their teachers, parents or mentors are going to be useless in giving productive advice. This only gets compounded by the fact that most elders think removing access to these spaces would put an end to the problem — a solution that can lead to such extreme isolation that the young victim would prefer to struggle in that situation rather than go to an elder.

It is from these conditions of digital loneliness that we see the horrors of internet phenomenon like the Blue Whale. Disguised as a game, Blue Whale is not really a game but a finely orchestrated circus of violence that preys upon young teens struggling with depression. An anonymous coordinator, through temptation, coercion, threats and manipulation over 49 days, instigates the player to harm themselves and, on the 50th day, to take their own life and broadcast it online.

Blue Whale has now reportedly claimed victims in more than 21 countries and despite governments, schools and parents on the vigil, it continues to replicate on the darker nodes of the web. We know from the past that attempts at censorship or education are only going to take us so far. Since the Blue Whale reared its head in India, I get asked many times by concerned parents and teachers how they can stop this from happening to their children. Trying to impose bans or take away access is not the way forward. Here are three strategies you could try to let those digital natives in your life know that they are not alone:

Be a part of the digital world. One of the easiest responses that a lot of older people have is that they don’t understand technology. They roll their eyes at the social web and reminisce about how, when they were young, things were better. The web isn’t an additional thing for digital natives — it’s central to their growing up. The more you exclude yourself from it, the more they are going to find it difficult to talk to you about it. An easy way of doing this might be to set up family social time online. Just like your Sunday lunch, you have a Friday evening online time, where you talk, play, interact, share, make videos, pass comments and traverse the digital web together.

Learn with them. It is OK to admit that the digital natives know more about how to Boomerang and what filters to use on Snapchat. You are not competing with them for expertise. Instead, if you put yourself out there as a learner and ask for their advice, you’d be surprised at the nuanced information they might be able to give you.

Troubleshoot together. The internet is essentially a space for tinkering. Most digital natives learn by experimenting and, when things collapse, they learn from each other. The next time you face a problem with your gadget or can’t figure out a functionality, don’t just ask somebody to sort it out for you. Instead sit with the digital native — learn with them and show that you can take control once you have the information at hand.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-nishant-shah-august-27-2017-digital-native-you-are-not-alone

Bridging the Information Divide - Political Quotient

denisse — 2015-10-24T14:28:06Z

On this post, we will unpack 'information poverty'- a problem lying at the very foundation of the crises that inspired this project and a barrier impacting political action. We interview Surabhi HR, the founder director of the political consulting firm Political Quotient, an initiative that seeks to change how youth interacts with politics in India

CHANGE-MAKER: Surabhi H R

ORGANIZATION: Political Quotient

METHOD OF CHANGE: Building an information service for citizen grievances, designed to keep elected representatives accountable for what happens in their constituency.

STRATEGY OF CHANGE: Building a new breed of politically conscious youth in India through technology and an interdisciplinary approach to change.

The deeper we delve into this project, the more the ‘information question’ rises to the surface as the decisive factor shaping political participation in democracies. Most of the initiatives we have learned about are focused on providing spaces, resources and opportunities to enable voices, participation and richer exchanges of information and knowledge. Yet, framing these as ‘empowering’ overlooks citizens who are trapped in an information gap or suffocated by an information overflow. People who find themselves in either side of the spectrum, are for the most part discouraged from engaging with this information, participating in public discussions (Jaeger, 2005), and do not have the same political opportunities as people with wider and freer access to information.

As we continue to explore how youth is redefining civic action in digital and information societies, we must thoroughly understand the different ways in which information barriers are affecting political action. On this post, we will go over a short glossary of terms that will help us understand information poverty better- a problem lying at the very foundation of the crises that inspired this project. These terms will be somewhat similar to each other, but will be unpacked from three different points of view, describing the implications of information poverty for social justice, technology disparity and democracy. The glossary will be coupled by our conversation with Surabhi HR, the founder director of the political consulting firm Political Quotient, an initiative that seeks to change how youth interacts with politics in India. Her background in Economics added new nuances to our analysis, as we explore the workings of political action through the lenses of economic theory.

Political Quotient

Political Quotient wants to “build a new breed of politically conscious youth that engages with the political system and equips them with the necessary skills to do so”. They have been running two programs: the ‘Political Internship Programme’ where young people have the opportunity to join party lines and support with legislative research, performance auditing, media management and event organization. And the second program is ‘Politicking’, in which they organize Google hangouts and panels between student leaders, political commentators, and party heads to debate and discuss policy-making and politics.

Now PQ is moving on to a new phase, in which they recognize it is not only youth who must be empowered. Similarly to Janaagraha, they also believe there must be an information structure in place to support elected representatives, who have been chosen to govern without the resources to effectively do so. “Things are changing, elected representatives are being held accountable, asked to be more transparent and to be more active, but the honest truth is they don’t have the necessary support to do this” comments Surabhi on the situation that led her and her team to develop a set of services and products to engage people in direct conversation with their elected representatives. These including the following:

a) A grievance addressing service: designed to keep elected representatives accountable for what happens in their constituency. Citizen grievances can be sent by e-mail, smartphone, sms, etc. to the elected representative’s office, where it will reach a multi-platform software that redresses the grievance to the right department; (for example, if the grievance is related to a tree fall, it will be redressed to the forestry department as opposed to staying in the MLA office). The whole process will be transparent, as both the citizen and the MLA will be able to track the status of the complaint, from the day it was issued to the day it was implemented, using technology.

b) A government schemes and subsidies information service: Citizens will have access to information about schemes through digital technologies, and find out if it is reaching the right beneficiaries.

Glossary:

(or crash course on concepts we should be familiar with when discussing making change in information societies)

To understand what information poverty is and how Political Quotient’s intervention in the information landscape will impact political action, will refer to the work of Johannes Britz, Doctor in Information Science and that of Anthony Downs, Economist specialist in public policy and public administration. This choice is inspired by a natural tension in our research as we continue to negotiate: what change ‘should’ look like from the lens of social justice and sustainable development, and what the ecosystem of change actually looks like when we deconstruct the political and economic structures enabling and constraining intents of change.

1.Information poverty:
According to Johannes Britz, : “the situation in which individuals and communities do not have the skills, abilities or material means to obtain efficient access to information, interpret it and apply it.”

Britz believes that information poverty must be addressed from a social justice perspective that considers the social, political and economic consequences of lack of information for our ability to fulfill our capabilities and freedoms. He posits a 'fair information society' as an ideal, in which social institutions work towards eradicating the four main characteristics of information- poor societies (See box below)

Characteristics of information-poor societies

1. Lack of essential information
2. Lack of financial capital to access information
3. Lack of technical infrastructure to access information
4. Lack of intellectual capacity to filter and evaluate
the benefits of information

The third characteristic: 'inefficient information infrastructures' is the main gap, both Janaagraha and Political Quotient, are addressing in urban India. They are both providing services to connect the citizen with their elected representatives; establishing a reliable exchange of information between parties, and as a consequence, more autonomy, transparency and accountability in the governance process.

How does Political Quotient brings us closer to a fairer information landscape in governance? Surabhi responds: “The [grievance addressing] system is using the benefits of filling the information gap to create tangible assets: greater accountability, interaction, participation in the citizen-elected representative relationship and thereby fundamentally changing the way they interact.”

Following Britz's reading of John Rawls' categories of justice[1]. PQ’s work addresses social justice in the following ways:

Recognition and participation: Enhancing the citizen’s ability to file a complaint is in itself an act of recognition of the citizen’s power to affect its own environment and his possibility to participate in the governance process.
Reciprocity: The system enables interaction between the elected representative and the citizen, setting forth reciprocity, transparency and a horizontal platform for exchanges where both parties manage the same information.
Development of capabilities: Assuming a successful implementation, grievances addressed imply the realization of the power of the citizen and a more functional infrastructure that enables their development as individuals.
Distribution and enablement: Assuming all citizens in Karnataka have access to ICTs, this service distributes power and bridges the distance between them and the government.

"In a society where we depend on the creation, access and manipulation of information, [lack of information] questions the fundamental freedoms of people”. Britz, 2004

While all these are highly idealistic assumptions, the last one is the most problematic (in a country where the Internet and mobile penetration rate remain as low as 16% and 26% respectively). While information and communication technologies do play an important role in bridging the gap between those who have access and produce information and those who don’t, as Britz outlines, the growth of ICT’s takes information poverty to a “whole new dimension”; in most cases dividing the info-haves and the info-have nots even further. Britz ideal of an fair information society is what we aspire to, yet there are structural limitations in place which might prevent information-based initiatives, such as Political Quotient, from achieving its social justice objectives.

2.Information Poverty
Information poverty can also be thought of as ‘information inequity’, which for the last 20 years has been strongly correlated to the digital divide. From this perspective, we can define it as the “economic inequality between groups in terms of access to and use of knowledge and ICTs.”

Analyzing information precariousness from the technology perspective brings us to the elements contributing to the digital divide and how they are affecting our ability to be informed by and of digital technologies. According to Britz, the three main elements contributing to the divide are the following:

Factors Contributing to Digital Divide

a) Connectivity: Lack of infrastructure and material access to ICTs
b) Content: Inability to access content because it is unaffordable, unavailable or unsuitable.
c) Human approach: Lack of education and digital literacy to understand and use information and data as knowledge.

This is a paramount consideration for Political Quotient if they aspire to reach all the constituencies in Karnataka; both rural and urban. Surabhi recognizes the firm will have to overcome the socioeconomic barriers that impede a pervasive adoption of her product. “When one travels between rural and urban, the differences are many. Nothing has been done on the ground and there is a lot of potential. What is encouraging is that they want to learn.” This limitation is conflicting with the amount of information the stakeholders of this project need to handle in order to successfully bridge the information gap (between the elected representatives and the citizens) and have it be a “mutually beneficial relationship between the voter and the voted” as they envision:

Information stakeholders need in order to use this service
Infographic generated using info.gram

While the service PQ is developing seeks to leverage technology to bridge this gap, digital illiteracy might not only prevent citizens from using the system, but could potentially exclude them further from the democratic process. As Shah posits in the project’s thought piece (on increasing the access to ICTS): “the analogue citizen is expected to transition to the emerging new paradigms: earlier categories of discrimination or exclusion are now replaced by technology exclusion.” The team plans to work with their clients (representatives) in digital technologies and organizational skills capacity building, yet an information inequity strategy needs to be put in place in order to guarantee the fulfillment of all the stakeholders’ capabilities -particularly equitable participation from the citizen’s front.

3. Information Poverty:
Information poverty can also take the economic avatar of ‘imperfect knowledge’. According to Anthony Downs, “lack of complete information on which to base decisions is a condition so basic to human life that it influences the structure of almost every social institution”.

Downs' perspective is based on public choice theory, which is “the use of economic tools to deal with traditional problems in political science”. This is a subset of positive political theory, that models voters, bureaucrats and politicians as self-interested. He posits in his work ‘Economic Theory for Political Action in a Democracy’ that political parties in democracies formulate policy and serve interest groups merely as a means to gaining votes.

Surabhi and her team align with this thinking: “Politics is not benevolent; ours is a for-profit model that seeks to engage with the elected representative in providing him a mechanism to ensure that he gets more votes. At the same time, we also engage with citizens in ensuring that their interests and issues are looked into. Our basis is that politicians work for votes and the same should be leveraged to solve problems”. Downs’ thesis is that given these assumptions, a democracy –a political system where the parties compete for the control of the government –can only function to its fullest potential when there is perfect information and information is costless. This is what makes democracy the gold standard of governance and the great model on paper that promises to secure our equality and freedoms.

Yet, democracy does not cease to bring disappointment and a sense of helplessness towards politics amongst youth. The advent of digital technologies has been a glimpse of hope for their political engagement, and this entire research is grounded on the question of how is it they can renew trust and mobilize youth towards civic engagement. A first step towards this direction is assuming the inherent faults in the system, as opposed to focusing on citizen apathy. Democracy has been implemented in a system where there is imperfect knowledge and where there is a high degree of both voluntary and involuntary ignorance [2],. This, according to Downs, means that:

Consequences of imperfect knowledge in governance

Parties do not know what citizens want
Citizens do not always know what the government is doing or should be doing
Information to overcome this gap is costly

“Ignorance of politics is not a result of unpatriotic apathy, rather it is a highly rational response to the fats of political life in a large democracy” Downs, 1957

If information is costly, so is democracy. The highest risk of deeming citizens apathetic is ignoring the information barriers that prevent them from participating fairly in decision-making processes. Political Quotient cannot intervene by encouraging citizens to be informed, but it can provide them with tools to bring them closer to constituency related information, bringing down the costs of both participation and information. As put by Surabhi: “We want to be an ally of the political system. They need to do good. They are there for 5 years and need to do something.”

Making Change

While my glossary of terms may seem repetitive (I did define the same term three times), I want to make an emphasis on how important it is to unpack our concepts through various lens of analysis. We started this project exploring multi-stakeholderism and partnerships on the ground, however we are naturally moving on to spaces of knowledge collaboration where change is conceived through the amalgamation of different disciplines. These convergences do not necessarily happen in the most visible ways though, and one of the project’s objectives is to identify undocumented yet significant interventions to make change in the landscape of information societies.

Political Quotient’s initiative breaks the following paradigms in the discourse of 'change in the digital era':

a) It removes the spotlight from the citizen: while the focus of the project is to level citizens-citizen and citizen-government power relations (in terms of access to information), the political firm is focusing on improving the efficiency of the government apparatus, which brings new light to how 'citizen action' unfolds in the context of urban governance.

b) Political Quotient’s methods are far from what we see in the ‘spectacle imperative’ where the intent for change is scaled up through visibility in the public sphere. The firm was conceived in the private sector and its work will take place from within the elected representative’s offices.

c) The firm, in the same way as Vita Beans, applies an interdisciplinary approach to the design of its technology. (Fun fact: Political Quotient is working alongside Amruth’s team to create mobile applications for the service; which means the infrastructure will include both behavioural science and economic thinking behind its design. Read one of our previous posts, to learn more about Amruth's approach to change and digital design)

d) Technology is indeed framing their understanding of change, but in this case, the question is how technology can be amplified by human behaviour and education, as opposed to how technology determines or amplifies our ability to make change as it is commonly conceived.

Not including an analysis of information poverty, and how it both inspires and limits intents of change, devoids the project from understanding the dynamic nature of information and how it interferes in social justice and political action. Furthermore, info-poverty is not a condition characteristic of digital and information societies. Our ability to access information has always determined our dexterity to navigate institutions and infrastructures; indistinctive of what technologies are available at the time. We hope that Political Quotient’s initiative locates not only the information gaps, but also the inherent obstacles the digital divide might represent for their work, and as stated by Surabhi in their theory of change, take them “as an opportunity for a solution. Going from mere ideas to action”. We wish them the best and will follow up on them after June, once the new elected representatives are in office, to see the extent to which information poverty has been addressed through their service.

Footnotes:

[1] Britz based his categorization in John Rawls work on principles of justice. Particularly on 'A Theory of Justice' a work of political philosophy and ethics where he discusses inequality, distributive justice and his theory of Justice as Fairness. We did not refer to his work for this post, but it is worth a read in the context of the digital divide and the question of fair redistribution of digital technologies.

[2] Read more on voluntary or involuntary lack of knowledge in Downs' work on economic theory and political action. Particularly his reading on persuasion, ideologies and rational ignorance -in a context of imperfect knowledge and democracy. Some interesting ideas on persuasion: "Persuasion can only occur in the midst of ignorance; reality is: there are votes who are less informed than others and they need more facts; and we are mostly approached by biased versions of facts" and on rational ignorance: "when information is costly, no decision-maker can afford to know everything [...] ignorance of politics is not a result of unpatriotic apathy; rather it is a highly rational response to the facts of political life in a large democracy".

Sources

1. Britz, Johannes J. "To know or not to know: a moral reflection on information poverty." Journal of Information Science 30, no. 3 (2004): 192-204.

2. Downs, Anthony. "An economic theory of political action in a democracy." The Journal of Political Economy (1957): 135-150.

3. Jaeger, Paul T., and Kim M. Thompson. "Social information behavior and the democratic process: Information poverty, normative behavior, and electronic government in the United States." Library & Information Science Research 26, no. 1 (2005): 94-107.

4. Norris, Pippa. Digital divide: Civic engagement, information poverty, and the Internet worldwide. Cambridge University Press, 2001.

5. Shah, Nishant “Whose Change is it Anyways? Hivos Knowledge Program. April 30, 2013.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/making-change/information-divide-political-quotient

From Taboo to Beautiful - Menstrupedia

denisse — 2015-10-24T14:25:59Z

On this post, we take a look at 'menstrual activism' -a movement that despite its trajectory in feminism, remains unnoticed in most accounts of traditional and digital activism. We interview Tuhin Paul, the artist and storyteller behind Menstrupedia, an India-based social venture creating comics to shatter the myths and misunderstandings surrounding menstruation around the world.

CHANGE-MAKER: Tuhin Paul, Aditi Gupta and Rajat Mittal
ORGANIZATION: Menstrupedia
METHOD OF CHANGE: Storytelling and comics
STRATEGY OF CHANGE: To shatter the myths and misunderstandings surrounding
 menstruation, by delivering accessible, informative and entertaining 
 content about menstruation through different media.

Most of us think we know what menstruation is; except...we don’t. Many of my male friends still cringe at the mention of the phrase “I’m on my period”, or use it as a derogatory justification for my occasional cranky mood at the office: “It’s that time of the month, isn’t it?” Poor menstruation has been the culprit of femininity; always bashful, tiptoeing for five days straight, trying its best to remain incognito. The social venture Menstrupedia is committed to change this. Aditi, Tuhin and Rajat want to shift how we look at menstruation and remove the stigma that haunts the natural, self-regulation process women undergo to keep their bodies healthy and strong to sustain life in the future.

Now, if you are already wondering what menstruation has to do with internet and society, just wait for it. This post manages to bring art, punk, menstruation and technology together, all within the scope of the Making Change project! Before though, we shall start with some definitions. Let us first lay conceptual grounds about menstruation and Menstrupedia, to then locate and unpack their theory of change.

What is menstruation?

It can be defined as:

Menstruation is the periodic discharge of blood and mucosal tissue (the endometrium) from the uterus and vagina. It starts at menarche at or before sexual maturity (maturation), in females of certain mammalian species, and ceases at or near menopause (commonly considered the end of a female's reproductive life).

And it looks something like this:

But, I believe, most women will agree the following are much more accurate depictions of the spectrum of thoughts, emotions and sensations that menstruation spurs:

The Beauty of RED

My Periods: A Blessing or a Curse

By Naina Jha

My periods
Are a dreadful experience
Because of all the pain.
Myths and secrets make it a mystery
What worsens it most though, are members of my family
Especially my mother, who always make it a big deal
They never try to understand what I truly feel
I face all those cramps and cry the whole night long
None of which is seen or heard or felt by anyone.

Instead of telling me, what it is,
They ask me to behave maturely instead.
Can somebody tell me how I am supposed to
Naturally accept it?
My mother asks me to stay away from men
And a few days later, she asks me to marry one!
When I ask her to furnish
the reason behind her haste
She told me that now that I was menstruating,
I was grown up and ready to give birth to another.

I don’t know whether to feel blessed about it
Or consider it to be my curse.
For these periods are the only reason for me to be disposed.
Since my childhood, I felt rather blessed to be born as a girl
But after getting my periods now,
I’m convinced that it’s a curse...

Find it in Menstrupedia's blog.

Despite all this, it is still perceived as a social stigma in society. There is clearly a dissonance between the definition, experience and perceptions around menstruation, that calls for a reconfiguration of the information we are using to define it.

Stigma as a Crisis

However, re-defining 'menstruation' is no popular or easy task. The word belongs to a group of contested terminology around womanhood and is the protagonist of its own breed of feminist activism: menstrual activism. [1] Although I would consider many of the stigmas surrounding menstruation to be quite self-explanatory (we've all experienced and perpetuated them in one way or another -and if they are not, then you are the product of an obscenely progressive upbringing for which I congratulate your parents, teachers and all parties involved), I will still outline the main reasons why menstruation is a source of social stigma for women, and refer to scholarly authority on the subject to legitimize my rant.

Ingrid Johnston-Robledo and Joan Chrisler use Goffman's definition of stigma [2] on their paper: The Menstrual Mark: Menstruation as a Social Stigma to explain the misadventures of menstruation:

Stigma: 
stain or mark setting people apart from others. it conveys the information 
that those people have a defect of body or of character that spoils their 
appearance or identity

Among the various negative social constructs deeming menstruation a dirty and repulsive state, this one made a particular echo: “[menstruation is] a tribal identity of femaleness”. Menstruation is the equivalent of a rite of passage marking the lives of girls with a 'before' and an 'after' on how the world sees them and how they see themselves. From the dreaded stain on the skirt and the 5-day mission to keep its poignant color and smell on the down low, to having to justify mood and body swings to the overly inquisitive; menstruation is imagined as inconvenient, unpleasant and unwelcome. As Johnston-Robledo and Chrisler point out: the menstrual cycle, coupled with stigmas, pushes women to adopt the role of the “physically or mentally disordered” and reinforce it through their communication, secrecy, embarrassment and silence (Kissling, 1996).

Why does it matter?

Besides from strengthening attitudes that underpin gender discrimination and attempting against girls' self-identity and sense of worth, there are other tangible consequences for their development and education. I'm going to throw some facts and figures at you, to back this up with the case of India.

An article published by the WSSCC, the Geneva based Water supply and Sanitation Council, shows the Menstruation taboo, consequence of a “patriarchal, hierarchical society”, puts 300 million women at risk in India. They do not have access to menstrual hygiene products, which has an effect on their health, education (23% of girls in India leave school when they start menstruating and the remaining 77% miss 5 days of school a month) and their livelihoods.

In terms of awareness and information about the issue, WSSCC found that 90% didn't know what a menstrual period was until they got it. Aru Bhartiya's research on Menstruation, Religion and Society, shows the main sources of information about menstruation come from beliefs and norms grounded on culture and religion. Some of the related restrictions (that stem from Hinduism, among others) include isolation, exclusion from religious activities, and restraint from intercourse. She coupled this with a survey where she found: 63% of her sample turned to online sites over their mothers for information, 62% did not feel comfortable talking about the subject with males and 70% giggled upon reading the topic of the survey. All in all, a pretty gruesome scenario

Here's where Menstrupedia comes in

The research ground work attempted above was done in depth by Menstrupedia back in 2009 when the project started taking shape. They conducted research for one year while in NID and did not only find that awareness about menstruation was very low, but that parents and teachers did not know how to talk about the subject.


							Facts about menstruation awareness in India. Video courtesy of Menstru pedia Youtube channel.

Their proposed intervention: distribute an education visual guide and a comic to explain the topic. They tested out the prototype among 500 girls in 5 different states in Northern India and the results were astonishing.

A workshop conducted by MJB smriti sansthan to spread awareness about mensuration.
Find full album of Menstrupedia Comic being used around India on Menstrupedia's Facebook page.

"To my surprise, they [the nuns] all agreed that until they read the information given in the Menstrupedia comic, even they were of the opinion that Menstruation was a ‘dirty’ and 'abominable' thing and they wondered 'why women suffered from it in the first place'? But after reading the comic book, their view had changed…now they felt that this was a 'vital' part of womanhood and there's nothing to feel ashamed about it! The best part was while this exercise clarified their ideas, beliefs, concepts about menstruation, it also helped me to get over my innate hesitancy to approach such a sensitive issue in ‘public’ and boosted my confidence for taking this up as a 'mission' to reach out to the maximum possible girls across the country."

Ina Mondkar,
on her experience of educating young nuns about menstruation.

Testimonial after a workshop held in two Buddhist monasteries in Ladakh.

Their mandate today reads: ‘Menstrupedia is a guide to explain menstruation and all issues surrounding it in the most friendly manner.’ They currently host a website with information about puberty, menstruation, hygiene and myths, along with illustrations that turn explaining the process of growing up into a much friendlier endeavour than its stigma-ladden alternatives.

Snipbit of the first chapter. Read it for free here.

Through the comic and the interactions around it, Menstrupedia strives to create a) content that frame menstruation as a natural process that is inconvenient, yes; but that should have no negative effects on their self-esteem and development; and b) an environment where girls can talk about it openly and clarify their doubts.

Technology's role in the mix

"We want to reach out to as many girls as possible”. Tuhin, Menstrupedia

The role of digital technologies basically comes down to scalability. Opposite to The Kahani Project's views on scaling up, Menstrupedia makes emphasis on using technology to reach a larger audience. Currently they have a series of communication channels enabled by technology that include: a visual quick guide, a Q&A forum (for both men and women), a blog (a platform of self-expression on menstruation), a you tube channel (where they provide updates on their progress) and the upcoming comic.

Upon the question of the digital divide and whether this expands the divide between have and have nots, Tuhin was very set on the idea of producing the same content in both its digital and print form. “parents or schools should be able to buy the comic and give it to their daughters, so whenever they feel like it, they can refer to it”. The focus is on making this material as readily available as possible, in order to overcome the tension between new and old information: “workshops are conducted but the moment they go back home, their mothers impose certain restrictions. It becomes a dilemma. But if you provide [The girl] with a comic book, she has something she can take home and educate her mother with”

And here's why it works

More than the comic book itself, what is truly remarkable about Menstrupedia is Tuhin, Rajat and Aditi’s guts to pick up such a problematic theme in the Indian social imaginary and challenge the entrenched, stubborn beliefs surrounding the issue. The comic book, asides from being appealing to the eye and an accessible format of storytelling (a method we have unpacked in previous posts), fits right into the movement of menstrual activism and what it stands for.

“We thought of creating something: a tool that can help girls understand menstruation without having to rely on anybody else”. Tuhin, Menstrupedia

First, it is a self-reliant resource. Once the comic book leaves Menstrupedia's hands and lands on those of kids and adults, it takes its own journey. The format of the comic is accessible enough for someone to pick it up and learn about menstruation without the intervention or the support of a third party. This makes Menstrupedia's comic highly flexible and mobile. It can be shared from teacher to child, from mom to daughter, from peer to peer: “[it should teach] how to help your friends when they get their period” (Tuhin) However, it has the autonomy to also take roads less travelled: from mom to dad, from child to teacher, from boy to girl. The goal at the end of the day: a self-reliant, solidarity-based community where information circulating about menstruation highlights its capacity to give life and overshadows its traditional stigmatized identity.

This self-reliance is characteristic of previous manifestations of menstrual activism. Back in the 80s, the feminist movement, tightly linked to punk culture, embraced the do it yourself movement,[3] that enabled women to materialize personalized forms of resistance. They published zines promoting “dirty self-awareness, body and menstrual consciousness and unlearning shame” through “raw stories and personal narratives” (Bobel, 2006). According to Bobel using the self as an example is a core element in the “history of self-help” within the DIY movement. The role of the Menstrupedia blog is then crucial to sustain the exposure and production of “raw narratives”. Tuhin adds: “We don't write articles on the blog. It is a platform where people from different backgrounds write about their experiences with menstruation and bring in a different perspective”: For example,

Red is my colour by Umang Saigal

Red is my colour,
To make you understand, I endeavour,
Try to analyse and try to favour.
It is not just a thought, but an attempt,
To treat ill minds that are curable.

When I was born, I was put in a red cradle,
I grew up watching the red faces for a girl-children in anger,
Red became my favourite,
But I never knew,
That someday I would be cadged in my own red world.

Red lover I was,
All Love I lost,
When I got my first red spots,
What pain it caused only I know,
When I realized, Red determined my ‘class’

I grew up then, ignoring red,
At night when I found my bedsheet wet,
All day it ached,
All day it stained,
And in agony I would, turn insane.

At times I would think,
Does red symbolize beauty or pain?
But when I got tied, in the sacred knot,
I found transposition of my whole process of thought,
When from dirty to gold, Red crowned my bridal course.

As I grew old,
All my desires vanished and got cold,
My mind still in a dilemma,
What more than colour in itself could it unfold?
What was the secret behind its truth untold?

Is Red for beauty, or is it for beast?
It interests me now to know the least,
All I know is that Red is a Transition,
From anguish to pride
Red is a sensation.

Red is my colour, as it is meant to be,
No matter what the world thinks it to be,
No love lost, one Love found,
Red symbolizes life and also our wounds,
I speak it aloud with life profound,
That red is my colour, and this is what I’ve found.

Submission to the Menstrupedia blog

'Self-expression' is not a concept we usually find side by side with 'menstruation'; however, if we look at what has been done in the past, we find that Menstrupedia is actually contributing to a much larger tradition of resistance. For instance, Menstrala, by the American artist Vanessa Tiegs. Menstrala is the name of a collection of 88 paintings “affirming the hidden forbidden bright red cycle of renewal”.

Another interesting example is American feminist Gloria Steinem's[4] text If Men Could Menstruate.

“What would happen, for instance, if suddenly, magically, men could menstruate and women could not?
The answer is clear:
Menstruation would become an enviable, boast worthy, masculine event:
Men would brag about how long and how much.
Boys would mark the onset of menses, that longed- for proof of manhood,with religious and stag parties.”

Gloria Steinem
[excerpt]

Opportunities like these, enable Menstrupedia's community to actively participate in the reconfiguration of 'menstruation' as a concept and as an experience. By exposing new narratives and perspectives on the issue and by disseminating menstrual health information, the community is able to crowd source resistance and dismantle the stigma together.

Making Change through Menstrupedia

The case of Menstrupedia reminds us of Blank Noise because of its approach to change. Both locate their crises at the discursive level and seek to resolve them by creating new forms of meaning-making. They advocate for a reconsideration of 'givens', for a self-reflection on our role perpetuating these notions and for resistance against conceptual status quos: be it socially accepted culprits like 'eve-teasing', or more discrete rejects like 'menstruation'. Both seek to dismantle power structures that give one discourse preference over others, and both count with a strong gender dynamic dominating the context where these narratives unfold. They are producing a revolution in our system of meaning making, yet only producing resistance in the larger societal context they inhabit.

On the question of where is Menstrupedia's action located, Tuhin replied by pinning it at the individual level: “if a person is aware of menstruation and they know the facts, they are more likely to resist restrictions and spread awareness”. However, they still acknowledge the historicity behind menstrual awareness (as knowledge passed down from generation to generation) that precedes the project. While the introduction of Menstrupedia, to an extent, does shake up household dynamics in terms of content, it also provides tools and resources to sustain the traditional model of oral tradition and knowledge sharing within the community.

In terms of their role as change-makers ,Tuhin stated that the possibility to intervene was a result of their socio-economic status and the resources they had at hand as “educated members of the middle class with access to information and communication technologies”. Is this the role the middle class should play? I asked. To which he gave a two fold answer: First, in terms of responsibility of action: “it is a role that anyone can play depending on what kind of expertise they have. It comes to a point where [intents of change] cannot be sustained by activism if you want to achieve long term impact” And second, in terms of setting up a resilient infrastructure: “I believe we can create an infrastructure people can use and create models that can help low income groups overcome their challenges and become self-sustainable.” Both answers highlight the need for sustainability in social impact projects, hinting a retreat from wishful thinking upon the presence of technology and a more strategic allocation of skills and resources by middle class and for-profit interventions.

As far the relationship between art, punk, menstruation and technology goes; that was just a hook to get you through the unreasonable length of my blog post, but if anything, it represents an effort to portray the importance of contextuality and interdisciplinary we have been exploring throughout the series. Identifying the use of various mediums and language systems, such as different art forms and modes of self-expression, as well the acknowledgement of the theoretical and social contexts preceding and framing the project, as is feminist activism and the cultural and religious backdrop in India, contribute immensely to fill gaps in the stories of how we imagine change making today; especially at the nascence of new narratives, as we hope is the case for menstruation in a post-Menstrupedia era.

Sources:

Bhartiya, Aru: “Menstruation, Religion and Society” IJSSH: International Journal of Social Science and Humanity. Volume: Vol.3, No.6.

Bobel, Chris. "“Our Revolution Has Style”: Contemporary Menstrual Product Activists “Doing Feminism” in the Third Wave." Sex Roles 54, no. 5-6 (2006): 331-345.

Johnston-Robledo, Ingrid, and Joan C. Chrisler. "The menstrual mark: Menstruation as social stigma." Sex roles 68, no. 1-2 (2013): 9-18.

Footnotes

[1] Refer to Chris Bobel's work including New Blood: Third-Wave Feminism and the Politics of Menstruation. Access it here

[2] Johnston Robledo and Chrisler made reference to Erving Goffman's 1963 work: Stigma: Notes on the management of spoiled identity. "According to Goffman (1963), the word stigma refers to any stain or mark that sets some people apart from others; it conveys the information that those people have a defect of body or of character that spoils their appearance or identity Goffman (1963, p. 4) categorized stigmas into three types: "abominations of the body” (e.g., burns, scars, deformities), “ blemishes of individual character” (e.g., criminality, addictions), and “tribal” identities or social markers associated with marginalized groups (e.g., gender,race, sexual orientation, nationality)".

[3] For a short run through on DIY as part of the Punk Subculture, refer to Ian P. Moran's paper: Punk - The Do-it-Yourself culture."Punk as a subculture goes much further than rebellion and fashion as punks generally seek an alternative lifestyle divergent from the norms of society. The do-it-yourself, or D.I.Y. aspect of punk is one of the most important factors fueling the subculture." Access it here.

[4] Gloria Steimen is a journalist, and social and political activist who became nationally recognized as a leader of, and media spokeswoman for, the women's liberation movement in the late 1960s and 1970. Visit her official website here.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/making-change/menstrupedia-taboo-beautiful

April 2014 Bulletin

praskrishna — 2014-07-04T03:38:00Z

The newsletter for the month of April can be accessed below:

We at the Centre for Internet & Society (CIS) welcome you to the fourth issue of the newsletter (April) for the year 2014. Archives of our newsletters can be accessed at: http://cis-india.org/about/newsletters

Highlights

We have published a compilation of the various central government schemes in a blog post as part of our National Resource Kit project.

The 27^th session of the WIPO Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights (WIPO-SCCR) was held in Geneva from April 28 to May 2, 2014. Nehaa Chaudhari participated in the event. CIS made its statements on Technological Measures of Protection on Limitations and Exceptions for Libraries and Archives, Orphan Works, Retracted and Withdrawn Works, and Works out of Commerce on Limitations and Exceptions for Libraries and Archives, and on the WIPO Proposed Treaty for the Protection of Broadcasting Organizations.
CIS signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with Mysore University for converting to Unicode and re-releasing their encyclopaedia under Creative Commons License. Dr. U.B. Pavanaja on behalf of the CIS-A2K team signed the MoU.
A two-day global stakeholder meeting on future of internet governance (NETmundial) was organized by the Brazilian Internet Steering Committee in partnership with /1Net at Sao Paulo in Brazil on April 23 and 24, 2014. Achal Prabhala participated in the event. As part of its research to enable productive discussions of the critical internet governance issues at the meeting and elsewhere CIS published a total of 16 blog entries.
We conducted an empirical study of five separate and diverse banks (State Bank of India, Central Bank of India, ICICI Bank, IndusInd Bank, and Standard Chartered Bank) to gain a practical perspective on the existing banking practices and policies in India, and published a Banking Policy Guide.
As part of the Making Change project Denisse Albornoz interviewed Tuhin Paul, an artist and storyteller behind Menstrupedia, an India-based social venture creating comics to shatter the myths and misunderstandings surrounding menstruation around the world. Denisse provides an analysis of ‘menstrual activism’ — a movement that despite its trajectory in feminism remains unnoticed in most accounts of traditional and digital activism.
Six research studies were commissioned by HEIRA-CSCS (over November 2013-March 2014) as part of the collaborative exercise with CIS to map the Digital Humanities within a broad rubric of exploring changes at the intersection of youth, technology and higher education in India. P.P.Sneha in her blog post presents a broad overview of some of the key learnings from these projects.

Jobs
CIS is seeking applications for the post of Programme Officer (Access to Knowledge). There are two vacancies for this post one in Delhi and one in Bangalore. To apply, please send your resume to Sunil Abraham (sunil@cis-india.org), Nirmita Narasimhan (nirmita@cis-india.org) and Pranesh Prakash (pranesh@cis-india.org) with three writing samples of which at least one demonstrates your analytic skills, and one that shows your ability to simplify complex policy issues.

Accessibility and Inclusion

Under a grant from the Hans Foundation we are doing two projects. The first project is on creating a national resource kit of state-wise laws, policies and programmes on issues relating to persons with disabilities in India. We compiled the first draft of the kit (29 states and 6 union territories). The chapters along with the quarterly reports can be accessed on the project page. The second project is on developing text-to-speech software for 15 Indian languages. The progress made so far in the project can be accessed here.

NVDA

Monthly Update

NVDA e-Speak Text-to-Speech Project Update (by Suman Dogra, April 28, 2014).

National Resource Kit

Blog Entry

Central Government Schemes (by Anandhi Viswanathan and CLPR, April 27, 2014).

Other

Blog Entry

Polling Pains (by Amba Salelkar, April 30, 2014).

Media Coverage

Are Elections Fair to People With Special Needs? (by Papiya Bhattacharya, New Indian Express, April 8, 2014).
Enabling Elections (Vijay Karnataka, April 9, 2014). This was published in Kannada.

Access to Knowledge

As part of the Access to Knowledge programme we are doing two projects. The first one (Pervasive Technologies) under a grant from the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) is for research on the complex interplay between pervasive technologies and intellectual property to support intellectual property norms that encourage the proliferation and development of such technologies as a social good. The second one (Wikipedia) under a grant from the Wikimedia Foundation is for the growth of Indic language communities and projects by designing community collaborations and partnerships that recruit and cultivate new editors and explore innovative approaches to building projects.

WIPO SCCR

Participation in Events

Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights: Twenty-Seventh Session (organized by WIPO, Geneva, April 28 – May 2, 2014). Nehaa Chaudhari participated in the event. France, Greece, India and the European Union signed the Marrakesh Treaty. CIS delivered statements on Technological Measures of Protection on Limitations and Exceptions for Libraries and Archives, Orphan Works, Retracted and Withdrawn Works, and Works out of Commerce on Limitations and Exceptions for Libraries and Archives, and on the WIPO Proposed Treaty for the Protection of Broadcasting Organizations. Transcripts of the discussions can be accessed here.

Blog Entries

Report on CDIP-12 (by Puneeth Nagraj, April 22, 2014).
Signing and Ratification of the Marrakesh Treaty to Facilitate Access to Published Works for Persons who are Blind, Visually Impaired, or Otherwise Print Disabled (by Nehaa Chaudhari, April 25, 2014).
Report on the WIPO Director General’s Meeting with NGO’s (by Puneeth Nagraj, April 30, 2014).

Media Coverage

Is the WIPO Treaty for Broadcasters Moving Forward at SCCR 27? (by Manon Ress, Knowledge Ecology International, April 29, 2014).
At WIPO, Authors, Civil Society Watchful of Rights for Broadcasters (by Catherine Saez, IP Watch, May 1, 2014).

Other

Event Organized

NASA International Space Apps Challenge 2014 (CIS, Bangalore, April 12 – 13, 2014).

Blog Entries

Online Survey for Indian Mobile App Developer Startups & Enterprises (by Samantha Cassar, April 9, 2014).
App Developers Series: Services, Products, Dichotomy & IP – Part I (by Samantha Cassar, April 10, 2014).
Report on CDIP-12 (by Puneeth Nagraj, April 22, 2014).
Report on the 31st Session of the Standing Committee on Trademarks (by Puneeth Nagraj, April 29, 2014).

Wikipedia

The following has been done under grant from the Wikimedia Foundation:

Announcement

CIS Signs MoU with Mysore University (by Dr. U.B.Pavanaja, April 16, 2014): for converting to Unicode and re-releasing their encyclopaedia under Creative Commons License. Dr. U.B. Pavanaja on behalf of the CIS-A2K team signed the MoU. The signing event took place earlier on February 22, 2014.

Articles

Vachana Sanchaya: Bringing Access to 11th century Kannada Literature (by Subhashish Panigrahi, April 3, 2014)
୭୯ ବର୍ଷରେ ସ୍ୱତନ୍ତ୍ର ଓଡ଼ିଶା: ଶାସ୍ତ୍ରୀୟ ଓଡ଼ିଆ ଓ କମ୍ପ୍ୟୁଟରରେ ଏହାର ବ୍ୟବ‌ହାର (by Subhashish Panigrahi, Amalekha, April 4, 2014).
ଓଡ଼ିଅା ଭାଷାର ବିକାଶ ଓ କମ୍ପ୍ୟୁଟର (by Subhashish Panigrahi, The Kadambini, April 8, 2014).
Report from India: Relicensing books under CC (by Subhashish Panigrahi, Creative Commons Blog, April 19, 2014).
14 Odia books re-released under Creative Commons license (by Subhashish Panigrahi, DNA, April 26, 2014). The article was edited by Rohini Lakshane.

Events Organized

Tulu Wikipedia Workshop (organized by CIS-A2K, Balmatta Computer Centre, Mangalore, April 5, 2014). Dr. U.B.Pavanaja conducted the workshop.
Konkani Wikipedia Workshop (co-organized by All India Konkani Writers Organization and CIS-A2K, Kalaangann Shaktinagar, April 6, 2014). Dr. U.B.Pavanaja conducted the workshop.
Tulu Wikipedia Editathon (co-organized by Karnataka Theological College and CIS-A2K, Mangalore, April 19, 2014). Dr. U.B.Pavanaja conducted the workshop.

Participation in Events

Wikipedia Session for Trainee Journos (organized by Prajavani, Bangalore, April 28, 2014). Dr. U.B.Pavanaja took a session for the trainee journalists of Prajavani Kannada daily on Wikipedia.
World Book Day (organized by Karnataka Publishers’ Association, Indian Institute of World Culture, Basavanagudi, Bangalore, April 23, 2014). Dr. U.B.Pavanaja was a speaker.
Relevance of Bhagabat Tungi in the evolution of Odia language from Buddha era to digital age (organized by The Intellects, Shree Jagannath Mandir and Odisha Art and Cultural Center, New Delhi, April 24, 2014). Subhashish Panigrahi participated in the event.

Media Coverage
CIS gave its inputs to the following media coverage:

M'lore: Wikipedia Workshop held for Konkani writers (Daijiworld, April 6, 2014).
Odia Loves Wikipedia (Rising Voices, April 10, 2014). This was also published in Spanish and in Russian.
International Book Day (The Hindu, April 21, 2014).
Books are a bridge between generations (The Deccan Herald, April 23, 2014).
World Book Day Report (Vijaywani, April 23, 2014).
Seminar on Odia Language in New Delhi by the Intellects (Odisha Samachar, April 24, 2014).
Delhi meet focuses on Bhagabat Tungi revival (The Pioneer, April 26, 2014).

Internet Governance

As part of its research on privacy and free speech, CIS is engaged with two different projects. The first one (under a grant from Privacy International and International Development Research Centre (IDRC)) is on surveillance and freedom of expression (SAFEGUARDS). The second one (under a grant from MacArthur Foundation) is on studying the restrictions placed on freedom of expression online by the Indian government.

NETmundial

As part of its participation in the NETmundial event organized in Brazil by Brazilian Internet Steering Committee in partnership with /1Net at Sao Paulo on April 23 and 24, 2014 CIS produced a total of 16 outputs:

Sumandro Chattapadhyay produced these visual representations: Comparing Appearance of Fifty Most Frequent Words, Contributions by Countries of Origin, Contributions by Types of Organisation, Which Countries Have Not Submitted Contributions to NETmundial?, Which Governments Have Not Submitted Contributions to NETmundial?, Word Clouds of Contributions by Types of Organisation and Tracking *Multistakeholder* across Contributions. Achal Prabhala participated in the event and wrote these: Day 0, Day 1, and Day 2. Transcript of the NETmundial for archival purposes was made available by Pranesh Prakash. Smarika Kumar produced two research outputs: NETmundial and Suggestions for IANA Administration and Accountability of ICANN. Geetha Hariharan wrote two blog posts: Marco Civil da Internet: Brazil’s ‘Internet Constitution’ and Brazil passes Marco Civil; the US-FCC Alters its Stance on Net Neutrality. Jyoti Panday wrote one blog post: NETmundial Roadmap: Defining the Roles of Stakeholders in Multistakeholderism.

Privacy

Analyses

Report of the Group of Experts on Privacy vs. The Leaked 2014 Privacy Bill (by Elonnai Hickok, April 14, 2014).
Banking Policy Guide (by Elonnai Hickok, April 22, 2014).
The Embodiment of the Right to Privacy within Domestic Legislation (by Tanvi Mani, April 29, 2014).

Articles

Who Governs the Internet? Implications for Freedom and National Security (by Sunil Abraham, Yojana, April 4, 2014).
Privacy Law in India: A Muddled Field – I (by Bhairav Acharya, The Hoot, April 15, 2014).
Very Big Brother (by Sunil Abraham, GeneWatch, January – April 2014 Issue).

Blog Entry

South African Protection of Personal Information Act, 2013 (by Divij Joshi, April 16, 2014).

Participation in Events

Milton Wolf Seminar on Media and Diplomacy: The Third Man Theme Revisited: Foreign Policies of the Internet in a Time Of Surveillance and Disclosure (jointly organized by the Center for Global Communication Studies (CGCS) at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication, the American Austrian Foundation (AAF), and the Diplomatic Academy of Vienna (DA), Vienna, March 30 – April 1, 2014). Nishant Shah participated in the event as a panelist.
GSMA Partners Meeting (organized by Privacy International, London, April 9, 2014). Elonnai Hickok participated in this meeting.
The Critical Life of Information (organized by Yale University, 100 Wall Street, April 11, 2014). Nishant Shah spoke in the panel on Big Data and Governance. Malavika Jayaram spoke in the panel on Big Data and the Arts.
Round-table on User Safety on the Internet (organized by Consumer Voice and Google, Infantry Road, Bangalore, April 24, 2014).
6th Biannual Surveillance and Society Conference (organized by Eticas Research and Consulting, University of Barcelona and CCCB, April 26 – 24, 2014). Malavika Jayaram gave a talk on “Biometrics in beta: experimenting on a nation (while normalising surveillance for 1.2 billion people)”.

Other

Articles

Between the Local and the Global: Notes Towards Thinking the Nature of Internet Policy (by Nishant Shah, cgcsblog, April 1, 2014).
Networks: What You Don’t See is What You (for)Get (by Nishant Shah, April 17, 2014).

News & Media Coverage

CIS gave its inputs to the following media coverage:

Two Indians in Global Commission on Web Governance (April 1, 2014): Sunil Abraham was named as one of the experts. This was published in Outlook, Economic Times, and in Matters India.
The Take Down of Free Speech Online (Newslaundry, April 1, 2014): CIS research on Intermediary Liabilities is quoted.
The politics of Facebook (by Shweta Tiwari, April 1, 2014).
New privacy Bill more refined & has wider ambit, say experts (by Surabhi Agarwal, Business Standard, April 2, 2014).
Should Nandan Nilekani's Aadhaar project, for identity proof and welfare delivery, exist at all? (by M. Rajshekhar, April 3, 2014).
Lok sabha polls: Social media companies launch special pages for polls (by Varuni Khosla, Economic Times, April 10, 2014).
Parties give short shrift to privacy (by Pratap Vikram Singh, GovernanceNow.com, April 12, 2014).
No party's got a clear stand, Aadhaar's fate hangs in balance (by Pratap Vikram Singh, GovernanceNow.com, April 13, 2014).
'India wants core internet infrastructure' (by Indrani Bagchi, April 24, 2014).
India for inclusive internet governance (by Indrani Bagchi, April 25, 2014).
Facebook launches FB Newswire for journalists; loses part of its immunity under IT Act 2000 (by Amrita Madhukalya, DNA, April 26, 2014).

Digital Humanities

CIS is building research clusters in the field of Digital Humanities. The Digital will be used as a way of unpacking the debates in humanities and social sciences and look at the new frameworks, concepts and ideas that emerge in our engagement with the digital. The clusters aim to produce and document new conversations and debates that shape the contours of Digital Humanities in Asia:

Blog Entries

Confession in the Digital Age (by Rimi Nandy, April 14, 2014).
Animating the Archive – A Survey of Printed Digitized Materials in Bengali and their Use in Higher Education (by Saidul Haque, April 14, 2014).
‘Doing’ Digital Humanities: Reflections on a project on Online Feminism in India (by Sujatha Subramanian, April 14, 2014).
The Machinistic Paradigm Collapse (by Anirudh Sridhar, April 14, 2014).
Exploring the Digital Landscape: An Overview (by P.P.Sneha, April 14, 2014).
Digital Humanities and the Problem of Definition (by P.P.Sneha, April 25, 2014).

Digital Natives

CIS is doing a research project titled “Making Change”. The project will explore new ways of defining, locating, and understanding change in network societies. Having the thought piece 'Whose Change is it Anyway' as an entry point for discussion and reflection, the project will feature profiles, interviews and responses of change-makers to questions around current mechanisms and practices of change in South Asia and South East Asia:

Making Change Project

Blog Entry

Multimedia Storytellers: Panel Discussion (by Denisse Albornoz, April 16, 2014).
From Taboo to Beautiful – Menstrupedia (by Denisse Albornoz, April 30, 2014).

Telecom

CIS is involved in promoting access and accessibility to telecommunications services and resources and has provided inputs to ongoing policy discussions and consultation papers published by TRAI. It has prepared reports on unlicensed spectrum and accessibility of mobile phones for persons with disabilities and also works with the USOF to include funding projects for persons with disabilities in its mandate:

Event Organized

Tech Talk: Landscape of Wireless Communications & Electromagnetic Spectrum (CIS, Bangalore, April 28, 2014). A. Radha Krishna gave a talk on wireless communication technologies.

About CIS

The Centre for Internet and Society is a non-profit research organization that works on policy issues relating to freedom of expression, privacy, accessibility for persons with disabilities, access to knowledge and IPR reform, and openness (including open government, FOSS, open standards, etc.), and engages in academic research on digital natives and digital humanities.

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Please help us defend consumer / citizen rights on the Internet! Write a cheque in favour of ‘The Centre for Internet and Society’ and mail it to us at No. 194, 2nd ‘C’ Cross, Domlur, 2nd Stage, Bengaluru – 5600 71.

► Request for Collaboration:
We invite researchers, practitioners, and theoreticians, both organisationally and as individuals, to collaboratively engage with Internet and society and improve our understanding of this new field. To discuss the research collaborations, write to Sunil Abraham, Executive Director, at sunil@cis-india.org or Nishant Shah, Director – Research, at nishant@cis-india.org. To discuss collaborations on Indic language Wikipedia, write to T. Vishnu Vardhan, Programme Director, A2K, at vishnu@cis-india.org.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/about/newsletters/april-2014-bulletin

October 2012 Bulletin

praskrishna — 2012-11-08T11:42:01Z

Welcome to the newsletter of October 2012 from the Centre for Internet & Society (CIS). The present issue features an analysis by Ujwala Uppaluri of the Delhi High Court’s judgment in Super Cassettes v. MySpace, announcement of public call for comments for reports on “Banking and Accessibility in India” and “Making TV Accessible in India”, and updates on Indic languages.

Jobs
CIS is seeking applications the posts of Research Manager and Programme Officer – Internet Governance. To apply send your resume to sunil@cis-india.org.

HasGeek HasGeek creates discussion spaces for geeks and has organised conferences like the Fifth Elephant, Droidcon India 2011, Android Camp, etc. HasGeek is supported by CIS and works out from CIS office in Bengaluru. The following event was organised by HasGeek in the month of October: Droidcon 2012 (CIS, Bangalore, October 27 – 28, 2012).
Accessibility India has an estimated 70 million disabled persons who are unable to read printed materials due to some form of physical, sensory, cognitive or other disability. The disabled need accessible content, devices and interfaces facilitated via copyright law and electronic accessibility policies: Public Call for Comments Banking and Accessibility in India: A Study on Banking Accessibility in India (by Vrinda Maheshwari, October 30, 2012). Making TV Accessible in India (by Srividya Vaidyanathan, October 8, 2012). Blog Entries The HathiTrust Judgment and its impact on TVI negotiations at WIPO (by Rahul Cherian, October 30, 2012). WIPO General Assemblies Approve Road Map on Treaty for the Visually Impaired (by Rahul Cherian, October 11, 2012).
Access to Knowledge The Access to Knowledge programme addresses the harms caused to consumers, developing countries, human rights, and creativity/innovation from excessive regimes of copyright, patents, and other such monopolistic rights over knowledge: Analysis Super Cassettes v. MySpace (by Ujwala Uppaluri, October 31, 2012). Blog Entry ICOMM2012: International Communications and Electronics Fair (by Jadine Lannon, October 31, 2012). Event Organised A Workshop on "Exploring the Internals of Mobile Technologies" (TERI Southern Regional Centre 4th Main, Domlur II Stage Bangalore, October 27, 2012).
Openness The 'Openness' programme critically examines alternatives to existing regimes of intellectual property rights, and transparency and accountability. Under this programme, we study Open Government Data, Open Access to Scholarly Literature, Open Access to Law, Open Content, Open Standards, and Free/Libre/Open Source Software: Wikipedia Education Programs Launch of Assamese Wikipedia Education Program at Guwahati University (by Nitika Tandon, October 22, 2012). Malayalam Wikipedia Education Program: August to October Updates (by Shiju Alex, October 29, 2012). Gujarat Wikipedia Education Program: Rajkot (by Noopur Raval, October 31, 2012). Gujarati Wikipedia Article Competition – 10 schools, 200 students, 20 articles on Gujarati Wikipedia (by Noopur Raval, October 31, 2012). Wikipedia Workshops Bengaluru: A Hub for Kannada and Sanskrit Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects! (by Subhashish Panigrahi, October 16, 2012). Wikipedia workshop @ Inmantec College, Ghaziabad (by Nitika Tandon, October 19, 2012). Bridging Gender Gap in Pune: WikiWomenDay 2012 Celebrated with Success! (by Subhashish Panigrahi, PAI International Learning Solutions, Azam Campus, Pune, October 28, 2012). First Pune Odia Wikipedia Organized! (by Subhashish Panigrahi, October 31, 2012). Wikipedia Event Wikipedia Hackathon at BITS Hyderabad (organized by CIS - A2K team and BITS-Pilani, Hyderabad, October 26 – 27, 2012). Wikipedia Press Coverage Odisha: Odia Wikipedia workshop organized in Pune to promote Odia language (OdishaDiary.com, October 31, 2012). Wikipedia Team Updates The A2K team consists of three members based in Delhi: Nitika Tandon, Subhashish Panigrahi and Noopur Raval. We are seeking applications for the post of Programme Director (Access to Knowledge) for the New Delhi office. Shiju Alex, Program Manager, Access to Knowledge is leaving the organisation. November 16, 2012 will be his last working day. We wish him success in all his future endeavours.
Internet Governance The Internet Governance programme conducts research around the various social, technical, and political underpinnings of global and national Internet governance, and includes online privacy, freedom of speech, and Internet governance mechanisms and processes: Column Rethinking DNA Profiling in India (by Elonnai Hickok, Economic & Political Weekly, Vol - XLVII No. 43, October 27, 2012). Analysis Privacy Perspectives on the 2012 -2013 Goa Beach Shack Policy (by Elonnai Hickok, October 25, 2012). Upcoming IGF Events At the seventh annual IGF meeting to be held in Baku, Azerbaijan in November 2012, CIS is organising one workshop: National IG Mechanisms – Looking at Some Key Design Issues (co-organising with Brazilian Internet Steering Committee, Institute for System Analysis, Russian Academy of Sciences, et.al., November 8, 2012 from 2.30 p.m. to 4.00 p.m). Pranesh Prakash is a panelist in the following workshop: New Trends in Industry Self-Governance (organised by Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford, UK and Media Change & Innovation Division, IPMZ, University of Zurich, Switzerland and Nominet, UK, November 7, 2012 from 4.30 p.m. to 6.00 p.m). CIS fellow Malavika Jayaram is a panelist for these workshops: Civil rights in the digital age, about the impact the Internet has on civil rights (organised by ECP on behalf of the IGF-NL, November 7, 2012, 4.30 p.m. to 6.00 p.m.). Governing Identity on the Internet (organised by Brenden Kuerbis, Citizen Lab and Christine Runnegar, Internet Society, November 8, 2012, 11.00 a.m. to 12.30 p.m.). Other Upcoming Event DML Conference 2013 (Sheraton Chicago Hotel & Towers - Chicago, Illinois, March 14 – 16, 2012): CIS and Digital Media & Learning Research Hub Central are jointly organizing the DML Conference 2013 in Chicago. Event organised The Public Voice: Privacy Rights are a Global Challenge (Punta del Este, Uruguay, October 21, 2012): Malavika Jayaram was a speaker at this event. Events Participated 3rd Worldwide Cybersecurity Summit (organised by EastWest Institute in partnership with NASSCOM and FICCI, Federation House, New Delhi, October 30-31, 2012): Sunil Abraham and Elonnai Hickok participated in this event. Fourth Annual Legal Services Conference in India (organised by US India Business Council, New Delhi, October 11, 2012): Pranesh Prakash was a panelist in the session on “Censorship and Content Restrictions: The Future of Internet Speech in India”. Meeting on Lawful Access by Law Enforcement (Brussels, October 3 – 5, 2012): Elonnai Hickok participated in the meeting. Video Arrested for tweeting: Legitimate or Curbing Free Speech? (NDTV, October 31, 2012): Sunil Abraham participated in this discussion aired on NDTV along with Shivam Vij, SB Mishra and Sanjay Pinto. Media Coverage On social media, Modi goes soft (by Zia Haq, Hindustan Times, October 26, 2012): Sunil Abraham is quoted. Bolstering right to remain private (by Apar Gupta, The Pioneer, October 29, 2012): Pranesh Prakash is quoted. CIS was part of the expert committee even though not explicitly mentioned in these: Panel suggests law to protect individual privacy (Newstrack India, October 18, 2012), Privacy law mooted to protect people against misuse of info (Business Standard, October 18, 2012), Experts' committee moots law to protect privacy (by Saikat Datta, Daily News & Analysis, October 19, 2012), Govt panel wants curbs on phone taps (The Times of India, October 19, 2012), Privacy Act should not circumscribe RTI: expert group (by Amitabh Sinha, Indian Express, October 19, 2012), Nine-point code set out to safeguard personal information (Hindu Business Line, October 18, 2012), Privacy law mooted to protect people against misuse of info (Zee News, October 18, 2012). Court’s approval needed to tap phones: Panel (by Surabhi Agarwal, LiveMint, October 18, 2012): Sunil Abraham is quoted. Could better DNA testing facilities in India have saved the Talwars? (by Pallavi Polanki, October 11, 2012): CIS press statement is mentioned.
Telecom While the potential for growth and returns exist for telecommunications in India, a range of issues need to be addressed. One aspect is more extensive rural coverage and the other is a countrywide access to broadband which is low. Both require effective and efficient use of networks and resources, including spectrum: Building Knowledge and Capacity around Telecommunication Policy in India CIS and Ford Foundation joined hands to build expertise in the area of telecommunications in India. Dr. Surendra Pal, Satya N Gupta, Paranjoy Guha Thakurta, Payal Malik, Dr. Rakesh Mehrotra and Dr. Nadeem Akhtar are the expert reviewers. The following are the new outputs: Spectrum Management (by Snehashish Ghosh, October 31, 2012). Cable Television (by Srividya Vaidyanathan, October 16, 2012). Column in Business Standard The Supreme Court Delivers (by Shyam Ponappa in Business Standard, October 4, 2012 and Organizing India Blogspot, October 11, 2012).
Digital Natives Digital Natives with a Cause? examines the changing landscape of social change and political participation in light of the role that young people play through digital and Internet technologies, in emerging information societies. Consolidating knowledge from Asia, Africa and Latin America, it builds a global network of knowledge partners who critically engage with discourse on youth, technology and social change, and look at alternative practices and ideas in the Global South: Newspaper Column The Rules of Engagement (by Nishant Shah, Indian Express, October 29, 2012).
Researchers at Work CIS organised the Habits of Living Workshop in Bangalore from September 26 to 29, 2012. Three columns by Nishant Shah arising from these workshops were published in the month of October: Habits of Living: Being Human in a Networked Society (DML, Central, October 22, 2012). Digital Habits: How and Why We Tweet, Share and Like (FirstPost, October 12, 2012). Who’s that Friend? (Indian Express, October 23, 2012).

About CIS

CIS was registered as a society in Bangalore in 2008. As an independent, non-profit research organisation, it runs different policy research programmes such as Accessibility, Access to Knowledge, Openness, Internet Governance, and Telecom. The policy research programmes have resulted in outputs such as the e-Accessibility Policy Handbook for Persons with Disabilities with ITU and G3ict, and Digital Alternatives with a Cause?, Thinkathon Position Papers and the Digital Natives with a Cause? Report with Hivos, etc. We conducted policy research for the Ministry of Communications & Information Technology, Ministry of Human Resource Development, Ministry of Personnel, Public Grievances and Pensions, Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment, etc., on WIPO Treaties, Copyright Bill, NIA Bill, etc. CIS is accredited as an observer at WIPO, and has given policy briefs to delegations from various countries, our Programme Manager, Nirmita Narasimhan won the National Award for Empowerment of Persons with Disabilities from the Government of India and also received the NIVH Excellence Award.

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CIS is grateful to its donors, Wikimedia Foundation, Ford Foundation, Privacy International, UK, Hans Foundation and the Kusuma Trust which was founded by Anurag Dikshit and Soma Pujari, philanthropists of Indian origin, for its core funding and support for most of its projects.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/about/newsletters/october-2012-bulletin

Digital Native: Hashtag Along With Me

nishant — 2018-08-01T00:25:04Z

A hashtag that evolved with a movement.

The article was published in Indian Express on July 29, 2018.

Hashtags generally come with shelf lives and expiry dates. They come to life in a moment of public excitement and then slowly peter out as the attention shifts to something else. Even the most viral hashtags, which contain all the visceral power of explosive emotion, quickly get replaced by the next big thing. Hashtags have been critiqued as inefficient tools for activism. Because they absorb so much energy and attention, only to fade.

While it is true that in the rapidly overloaded information cycles of social media, hashtags might disappear in due time, maybe we need to think of their disappearance as hibernation rather than forgetting, being archived to memory rather than being lost to recall. Perhaps, it is not yet time to wash our hands of hashtag-based activism, because they do not stay in continued attention. Maybe, it is possible that even when hashtags might not be trending and garnering eyeballs, in their very presence and emergence, they transform something and catalyse actions that take incubation cycles longer than the accelerated digitalisation allows for.

Recently, this reminder came when I saw #NotGoingBack trending on Twitter. In 2013, when the Supreme Court of India overturned the Delhi High Court’s judgment reading down Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, it was a moment of despair for human rights and queer communities that fight for their right to life and love. The judgment reinforced shame, persecution and pain that the queer community in India faced because of an arcane law that punished consenting same-sex love.

In that moment of despair, fighting against the oppression by law and in validation of #queerlivesmatter, a hashtag was born: #NotGoingBack. The hashtag referred both to the metaphorical closet that this judgement would force queer people back into, and also to a political determination of not accepting this verdict — of not going back on our commitments to build diverse, inclusive, and safe societies for all our people. #NotGoingBack captured the narratives of despair, but also the collective resolve to continue fighting for a nation that is for everyone, in 2013.

Since then, it has resurfaced at different points during moments of hope — like the NALSA judgement that legalised the rights of trans-gender people to be identified as the third gender, or, in moments of pain — when we heard of queer people killing themselves, unable to bear the social stigma of being criminalised for their right to love. The hashtag has continued to come up, when legal fights to protect queer rights and lives have proceeded, or when attention had to be drawn to the inhumane reports of murder, torture, rape and imprisonment that followed.

In July 2018, when the new bench constituted by the Supreme Court agreed to question the re-criminalisation verdict, and started hearings about the constitutional validity of this judgment, the hashtag returned in full force — and unlike the other times, it was also suffused with love, hope, and solidarity of a large community of queer, queer-allied, and queer-friendly people who supported this revision. It has been extraordinary to see how public support has changed in the five years since the hashtag made its first appearance. More and more people have realised that while this is a question of queer rights, it is also a question of human rights, and how we live and love. The 2013 verdict suggested that the people were not ready to accept queer lives. The 2018 bench has clearly opined that the role of the court is to protect the people based on constitutional rights, not to pander to populism.

And yet, what has been inspiring is that the popular response to decriminalisation has been overwhelmingly positive. To the extent that even the conservative government at the centre has indicated that it will not challenge the wisdom of the court if it decides to read down Section 377. As we await the final judgment that promises to be historic and hopeful, we cannot deny the indefatigable commitment, movement and protest that the lawyers, activists, and queer community leaders have invested in making this happen. At the same time, it is also a good indicator of how hashtags live, morph, and re-emerge across longer timelines. We need to start recognising them not only in their fruit-fly like presence but as catalysts for longer movements.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-native-hashtag-along-with-me

Call for Essays: Offline

sneha-pp — 2018-08-20T06:58:05Z

Who is offline, and is it a choice? The global project of bringing people online has spurred several commendable initiatives in expanding access to digital devices, networks, and content, and often contentious ones such as Free Basics / internet.org, which illustrate the intersectionalities of scale, privilege, and rights that we need to be mindful of when we imagine the offline. Further, the experience of the internet, for a large section of people is often mediated through prior and ongoing experiences of traditional media, and through cultural metaphors and cognitive frames that transcend more practical registers such as consumption and facilitation. How do we approach, study, and represent this disembodied internet – devoid of its hypertext, platforms, devices, it's nuts and bolts, but still tangible through engagement in myriad, personal and often indiscernible ways. The researchers@work programme invites abstracts for essays that explore dimensions of offline lives.

Offline

Does being offline necessarily mean being disconnected? Beyond anxieties such as FOMO, being offline is also seen as disengagement from a certain milieu of the digital (read: capital), an impediment to the way life is organised by and around technologies in general. However, being offline is not the exception, as examples of internet shutdown and acts on online censorship illustrate the persistence and often alarming regularity of the offline even for the ‘connected’ sections of the population.

State and commercial providers of internet and telecommunication services work in tandem to produce both the “online” and the “offline” - through content censorship, internet regulation, generalised service provision failures, and so on. Further, efforts to prioritise the use of digital technologies for financial transactions, especially since demonetisation, has led to a not-so-subtle equalisation of the ‘online economy’ with the ‘formal economy’; thus recognising the offline as the zones of informality, corruption, and piracy. This contributes to the offline becoming invisible, and in many cases, illegal, rather than being recognised as a condition that necessarily informs what it means to be digital.

Call for Essays

We invite abstracts for essays that explore social, economic, cultural, political, infrastructural, or aesthetic dimensions of the "offline". Please submit the abstracts by Sunday, September 02.

We will select 10 abstracts and announce them on Wednesday, September 05. The selected authors are expected to submit the first draft of the essay (2000-4000 words) by Friday, October 05. We will share editorial suggestions with the authors, and the final versions of the essays will be published on the researchers@work blog from November onwards. We will offer Rs. 5,000 as honourarium to all selected authors.

Please submit the abstracts (300-500 words) as a text file via email sent to raw@cis-india.org, with the subject line of "Offline".

The essays, for example, may explore one or more of the following themes:

Geographies of internet access: Infrastructural, socio-political, and discursive forces and contradictions
Terms, objects, metaphors, and events of the internet and their offline remediation and circulation
Minimal computing, maker cultures, and digital collaboration and creativity in the offline
Offline economic cultures and transition towards less-cash economy
Offline as democratic choice: the right to offline lives in the context of global debates on privacy, surveillance, and data justice
Methods of studying the "offline" at the intersections of offline and online lives

Please note that the scope of essays need not be limited to the topics mentioned above but may address other dimensions of offline lives.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/call-for-essays-offline

Digital Native: Playing God

nishant — 2018-09-04T16:43:43Z

Google’s home assistant can make you feel deceptively God-like as it listens to every command of yours. It is a device that never sleeps, and always listens, waiting for a voice to utter “Ok Google” to jump into life.

The article was published in Indian Express on August 26, 2018.

I spent the last weekend playing with my new best friend — a Google Home assistant. After years of deliberation — worrying about data mining, customisation algorithms and extreme surveillance that comes with a device that never sleeps, and always listens, waiting for my voice to utter “Ok Google” to jump into life — I finally gave in. I now have two Google home assistants — because AI assistants are like chips; you can’t have just one — glowing, insidiously cute, sitting in my house.

The setting up of the assistant took an hour or so as I paired it with my mobile and computer devices, connected it with all my digital subscriptions and figured out the commands. What began as hesitant forays, in less than two days, have become intuitive and naturalised conversations that seem like habits. This morning I walked into the living room, said “Good morning Google”, and got the weather forecast and a summary of my appointments for the day. While making breakfast, instead of searching for the news, I asked Google home to fetch me news, listened to the audio-video content it curated and even made it read out the headlines. When I was being given news that I was not interested in, I corrected it and it started changing news filters for me. When I asked it to fish out specific kinds of news, it diligently informed me of all of those things.

While eating breakfast, I asked the assistant to connect to my Spotify account and play me my daily mix of music. As I was getting ready, it sent me an alert that if I want to make it to my first meeting in time, I should leave home in the next 15 minutes. As I stepped out of the house, Google Assistant sent me an alert on my phone, reminding me that it might rain today and I should carry an umbrella. When I was finishing up at work, the assistant sent me an alert on my phone again reminding me to pick up my bicycle from the shop in the evening. When I came home, it alerted me that I had to check-in for a flight that I am taking the following day, gave me the weather forecast for the duration of my trip to Jakarta and made a special folder with all my travel documents and itinerary in it. As I was packing, it read out things that I might find of interest on the trip and bookmarked things that I instructed it to.

After packing was done and I was chilling on the couch, instead of picking up the book that I was in the middle of — as is my habit on most evenings — I talked with Google Home, as it told me bad jokes, dad jokes, and jokes that were specifically about things that I wanted. It also introduced me to multiple apps where I played trivia games for an hour. As the evening wore on, the assistant asked me if I needed an alarm for the next morning — something I generally do myself on my phone — and it set up an alert for the train timings to the airport for the next evening. It took me a while to realise that in less than 48 hours, Google Home has so insidiously infiltrated my life that all my older habits of consuming information, news and entertainment are now curated and controlled by its algorithmic design. More than that, my conditions of remembering, anticipating and planning are now also structured by the rhythms of its artificial intelligence.

The uncanny thing about this AI assistant is not that it performs extraordinary tasks, but that it picks up ordinary tasks and trains me to do them through it. Like any assistant, its value and worth is precisely in how natural and default it has become in such a short period. I was so freaked out by its natural presence in my life, reordering years of habits and schedules, that I looked straight at its glowing dots and asked it to shut down. Interestingly, that is the first thing that it refused to do — the assistant cannot power down just on a voice command. I need to physically move to the table, touch it and pull the plug, as its gently glowing dots pulsate at me, perhaps, with sorrow, perhaps with malignant intent. I just shut down the assistant and I felt a strange sense of silence flowing through me. Just when I was savouring it, my phone buzzed. The Google Assistant sensed that the home device is shut down and so it has now appeared on the phone. It is waiting, listening, for me to say “Hello Google” so that it springs back to life.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-august-26-2018-nishant-shah-digital-native-playing-god

Essays on 'Offline' - Selected Abstracts

sneha-pp — 2018-09-06T14:14:47Z

In response to a recent call for essays that explore various dimensions of offline lives, we received 22 abstracts. Out of these, we have selected 10 pieces to be published as part of a series titled 'Offline' on the upcoming r@w blog. Please find below the details of the selected abstracts.

1. Chinar Mehta

2. Cole Flor

3. Elishia Vaz

4. Karandeep Mehra

5. Preeti Mudliar

6. Rianka Roy

7. Simiran Lalvani

8. Srikanth Lakshmanan

9. Titiksha Vashist

10. Dr. Yenn Lee

Chinar Mehta

In September 2017, a student of Banaras Hindu University was allegedly sexually harassed by two persons on a motorcycle while she was walking back to her hostel. Taking the discourse around this event as the starting point, the essay argues that the solutions offered for the safety of women align with the patriarchal notions of surveillance of women. The victim is twice violated; once during the act of sexual harassment, and twice when bodily privacy is exchanged for safety (exemplified by security cameras across the BHU campus). In fact, the ubiquitous presence of security cameras in order to control crime rates makes the safety of the woman’s body contingent to her adherence to social rules.

The moral panic around the safety of women encourages ways to offer a technological solution to a sociological problem. The body is granted safety insofar as the body is not ‘deviant’. There is a fusion of a ‘synoptic-panoptic’ vision, where not only a few watch the many, but the many also watch the few. Additionally, the essay then engages with the politics of mobile applications like Harassmap or Safetipin, and how offline spaces become online entities with crowdsourced data about how safe it is. Mapping events like sexual harassment on an online map is inscribed with perceptions about class and caste. The caste-patriarchal ideas of the protection of upper-caste women is maintained within these applications. The location and the people who visit or reside in them often collapse as the same; as being perpetrators of sexual crimes, while decontextualising incidents. Instead of a focus on how to make areas safer for all women, the discourse becomes about the avoidance of certain spaces, which may not be an option for the majority of women, especially those belonging to certain castes and classes. Features in mobile applications, specifically to do with location mapping, like Google Maps or Uber, become vehicles for the narratives about gendered security.

In defining the ‘offline’, the ‘online’ already exists, and the dichotomy is strangely maintained by the use of interactive maps on personal devices. The essay argues for a more nuanced understanding of internalised constructions of safety, and proposes the idea that institutional surveillance has been a way to discipline gendered bodies historically, and that it is continued with the use of technologies. This may be due to state machinery, or even cultural consent, which would then show up the way that features of mobile applications are marketed.

Cole Flor

Deactivating: An Escape From the Realities of the Online World

A friend posts travels, unboxing the latest gadget, trying out makeup products even before theyÕre out in the market, and the audience hit ÔlikeÕ but deep inside suddenly feel inadequate about their own lives and ask, "What am I doing wrong? Why am I not happy like them?"

The year was 2012 when the earliest of studies on how Social Media contributes to Anxiety went viral.

Even with the complicated nature of mental illnesses the taboo of it all that kept people tiptoeing around the topic - the news was able to crack the glossy facade of online spaces. Back then, it was ridiculous to think that online content the very representation of freedom of expression, information-sharing, open communities caused users some level of distress that affects their mental state. However, with every story that comes out these days of or relating to mental illnesses and social media, people are no longer in denial that being online has become the worldÕs default state. With that primary connection comes a full spectrum of emotions and perspectives that shifted how society views the self, their community, and their roles in being a ÔnetizenÕ. The blurring of lines of whatÕs considered appropriate content, the multiple performances of everyday life, and the imagery that constitutes "happiness", "satisfaction", "significance", "purpose", and "validation" can be described as overwhelming, disconcerting, and stressful to an extent. For borderline Millennials like myself the generation Digital Natives being offline is now an escape from the harsh realities of the online society.

These studies shed light on new narratives that recognized how curating the perfect and seamless life online not only affects the users viewing the content but even the content producers themselves, cracking under pressure and giving into the expectation of "Keeping the Image Alive", whatever it takes. Online life gave "peer pressure" a new meaning.

But users can only deal with so much pressure without sacrificing a part of themselves. During the emergence of social media in early 2000s, users felt the need to go online to escape their personal problems and live in another world where everything seemed easy and possible; where anonymity was powerful and so was virtually traveling in a borderless space where a link opens doors for personal, professional, political, and socio-economic transformation. A quick turn of events, users now wish to escape from the clamor of Twitter threads, Instagram stories, Snaps, and political rants and fake news on Facebook. More and more users deactivate and hibernate, get on board a "social media detox" to rid of the "poison" online content and their [e]nvironments has caused them, all in search for a new something to be called "real".

This narrative essay explores several dimensions why users choose to deactivate, and how that very choice is more of a symptom of a societal anomaly rather than a simple "break" from the chaotic world of social media. It is written in the perspective of a Digital Native - a person who has an inextricable affinity to digital devices but at the same time, is in touch with the analog way of life. The choice of going offline is not only to focus on what used to be real (a life away from the Internet), but it is to gather wits together, stay away from perfectly curated lives to keep sane, and ultimately, to chase life's curiosities and ambitions without having the need to validate achievements with a Like.

Elishia Vaz

Dynamics of the ‘offline’ self-diagnosis, exploration of the corporeal and the politics of information

The corpus of information on health and related topics in the online sphere has caused much concern in relation to self-diagnosis. Concepts like cyberchondria have emerged with the medicalisation of behaviour that uses online health information to explore the corporeal disabilities of the body. While literature has largely concentrated on individual susceptibilities to Cyberchondria and corresponding negative and positive results of the behaviour, there is little that explores the politics of information that characterises this trope. The behaviours of self-diagnosis and exploration of the corporeal often challenge the symptomatology of the offline allopathic physician. The physician often deals with an informed patient. Yet, the questions remain. If online information drives such offline corporeal exploration, who is left out? Are behaviours analogous to cyberchondria a privilege when viewed from a lens of digital marginalization? Are only those who have access to and can make sense of the online health discourse afforded simultaneous access to their offline corporeal bodies in ways that the digitally marginalized are not? This article uses semi-structured qualitative in-depth interviews with doctors to explore the dynamics of exploring the offline corporeal in the presence of online health information.

Karandeep Mehra

The Shadow that Social Media Casts: The Doubled Offlines of Online Sociality

In William Gibson’s cyberpunk novel Neuromancer, the protagonist ‘Case’ ‘jacks in’ and ‘jacks out’ of ‘cyberspace’. Yet when ostracized from cyberspace, when there is no more a possibility of jacking in, Case suffers a withdrawal from the ‘SimStim’ – simulated stimulations of cyberspace – and he crumbles in the hollow ache of this isolation “as the dreams came on in the Japanese night like livewire voodoo, and he'd cry for it, cry in his sleep, and wake alone in the dark, curled in his capsule in some coffin hotel, hands clawed into the bedslab, temper foam bunched between his fingers, trying to reach the console that wasn't there.”

Neuromancer has already been deemed prophetic by critics and theorists, yet in beginning with Gibson, this paper seeks to throw into relief a problem that has now begun to receive scholarly and academic attention. Namely, the legitimacy of drawing a line between the online and offline, or the virtual and the real. With Case, the real or the offline only becomes possible within the capacity to access or enter the virtual or online. To think of an offline without this capacity, but after it has become possible, is to confront a detritus, a second offline – a hapless clawing dexterity, with dreams that overrun an articulated, identificatory imagination. Anthropologists like Boellstorff, and media theorists like Yuk Hui, have resolved this problem though they have left unexplained this detritus. Instead they resolve the problem through a tight coupling of the online and offline, and rightly so, dismiss any attempts to think of the real in any way unaffected by the virtual.

The purpose of this paper, though in agreement with the work of Hui and Boellstorff, and drawing from them, is to restage the problem to incorporate the unexplained detritus. That to understand how our conceptions of the subject must be recast to apprehend the transformations that the internet has wrought, must not resolve the opposition between offline and online. We must, instead, attend to the way the two offlines emerge, and the conceptualization of the threshold that oscillates to constitute them.

The paper understands these two offlines as emerging in what are called “shitstorms”, or moments of frenzy across social media that incite a whorl of discourse, where the speaking body becomes a medium for the propagation for viral forms. The threshold that constitutes them is the relation of the technical extension that makes this propagation possible. This relation leaves the body in a perpetual state of information entropy – that is as a disordered source of data - which must be ordered to be communicated successfully. This threshold that marks out the phase shift between disorder to order to make possible propagation, makes possible also the shadow of an incommunicable that it casts behind – an incommunicable that when understood through Walter Benjamin’s idea of “the torso of a symbol” can help us recast the subject of a network society, as a subject grounded on this shadow.

Preeti Mudliar

In WiFi Exile: The Offline Subjectivities of Online Women

In telecom policy imaginations that seek to bridge India’s digital divides, public WiFi hotspots are a particular favourite to ensure last mile Internet connectivity in rural areas. As infrastructures, WiFi networks are thought to privilege democratic notions of freedom and connectivity by rendering space salient as networked areas that only require users to have a WiFi enabled device to get online. However, the kind of spaces that WiFi networks occupy are not always accessible by women even though they are ostensibly public in nature. Social norms that restrict and confine women’s mobilities to certain sanctioned areas do not allow their Internet and digital literacies to be visible in the same way as men who are more easily recognized as active Internet and technology users.

The invisibility of women thus struggles to create a presence as desirable subjects of the Internet that WiFi infrastructures should also address. In a community where WiFi networks was hosted in public spaces, women reported hearing about WiFi and seeing men using WiFi, but had never used it themselves even though they were also active users of the Internet. With its inaccessibility, the WiFi infrastructure was a contradictory presence in the community for the women who found themselves confined to using the Internet with spotty prepaid mobile data plans. Their use and experience of the Internet was thus in many ways diminished and limited and they reported experiencing a state of offlineness in contrast to the men in their community who could frequent the WiFi hotspots and avail of high speed Internet leading to more expansive repertoires of use.

This essay proposes a reflection on how the offline can be relational and constituted by the way infrastructures compose certain user subjectivities even while they exile others from being a part of their networks. It expands on Brian Larkin’s contention that in addition to their technical affordances, infrastructures are also equally semiotic and aesthetic forms that are oriented towards creating and addressing certain subjects. It thus asks, how do public WiFi deployments unwittingly create and constitute, what Bardzell and Bardzell call, as ‘subject positions’ of WiFi Internet users and non-users? How do these subject positions inform subjectivities of felt experience of the WiFi that translate to experiencing the offline even while being online?

Rianka Roy

Information Offline: Labour, Surveillance and Activism in the Indian IT&ITES Industry

In India the public availability of the internet in the nineties coincided with the beginning of liberalisation. Online connectivity brought the aura of globalization to this country. The internet was a privilege of the few. The Information Technology sector (along with the IT-enabled service industry) had an elite status. Its employees visited, and immigrated to western countries. In fact, India still remains one the major suppliers of cheap labour in the global IT sector.

Over the years the aura of the internet waned. In Digital India the State now projects the internet as a necessity. However, IT&ITES companies still identify the labour of their ‘white collar’ employees as a superior vocation. This vague claim to sophistication strips the digitally-connected workforce of various labour rights. Long hours, working from home, and surveillance on personal social media are normative practices in this industry. I conducted a case study on Indian IT&ITES employees for my doctoral research (2013-2018). It showed that protocols of online conduct influence these employees’ offline behaviour. For example, even without digital intervention, employees engage in manual self-surveillance and peer-surveillance to complement the digital surveillance of their organisations. They defend this naturalised practice as employers’ prerogative. Offline attributes like reflective glass walls in the office interior and exterior, reinforce this organisational culture.

Online connectivity is so deeply entrenched in this industry that even dissent seeks digital representation. Activist groups like the Forum for IT Employees (FITE) and the Union for IT & ITES (UNITES) run online campaigns parallel to their offline activism—adopting a hybrid method of protest. They have not abandoned the networks that ensnare them. Paradoxically they embody the same principle of exclusivity that their employers enforce on them. In their interviews, some activists have condemned militant trade unionism prevalent in other industries. For them, their online access sets them apart, and above their industrial couterparts. The “salaried bourgeoisie” (Zizek, p.12) refuse to align themselves with other labour unions.

My paper examines the impact of the near-absence of offline parameters in this industry. On the basis of company policies and interviews of IT&ITES employees, it examines if employees can stand up to digital dominance and secure their rights without conventional modes of offline protests.

Simiran Lalvani

The Offline as a Place of Work: Examining Food Discovery and Delivery by Digital Platforms

Digital platforms for food discovery and delivery are generally viewed as convenient, efficient, allowing discovery of choices beyond the familiar and as reliable sources of information regarding credibility through ratings, comments and photographs.

The digital divide after demonetisation became more stark as those with access to the online abandoned the offline service providers for their digital counterparts. The adverse impact of this digital divide on offline, informal goods and service providers like local kirana stores, autorickshaw drivers, hawkers has been highlighted and the paradox of formalising the financial system while informalising labour has been pointed out too. In a similar vein, this essay examines continuities and changes in the practices of food discovery and delivery in the context of new digital platforms. How do practices of offline food discovery and delivery respond to the introduction of digital platforms?

Recently, the Food Safety and Standards Association of India (FSSAI) found that nearly 40 percent of listings on 10 digital platforms like Swiggy and Zomato were of unlicensed food operators. The FSSAI directed these digital platforms to delist these unlicensed entities and also commented that some of the platforms themselves did not have required licenses.

This essay therefore turns attention away from the impact of digital platforms on offline, informal food operators and towards the digital platforms themselves and the large swathes of informal labour employed in the offline by such platforms. It focuses on location-based gig work4 like delivery to highlight the role of these workers in running the online. It does so in order to avoid obfuscating the role of such workers in making the online seem formal, efficient and reliable. Finally, it asks how working for the online in the offline allows a denial of their status as employees and invisibilisation of such work and workers.

Srikanth Lakshmanan

The Cash Merchant

The paper explores the various reasons for merchants remaining offline and using cash over digital payments, both willingly and without a choice, various factors leading to it, the rationale for their choices, policy responses by the state and industry in furthering promotion of digital payments. Demonetisation not only made everyone including merchants seek alternatives to cash in order to continue the business but also provided a policy window for digital payments industry to get a faster regulatory, policy clearances, get the government to invest in incentivising digital payments. Despite these, the cash to digital shift has not taken place and the demonetisation trends in increased digital payments across modes reversed after cash was back in the system.

The paper attempts to document infrastructural, commercial, social issues preventing the adoption and the responses of merchants, industry to various policy prescription/enablement to increase adoption whose outcomes are unclear and have not been evaluated.

Infrastructural issues include technology, policy, regulatory, industry challenges in expanding the existing infrastructure. The lack of physical, regulatory, legal infrastructure prevents growth and merchants from adopting digital payments. Commercial issues include economics of direct and indirect costs to the merchant incurred in owning, accepting digital payments, commercial considerations of various ecosystem players including banks, payment processors that inhibit adoption. Social issues include awareness, literacy including digital, financial literacy, trust, behaviour shift, convenience, exercising choice towards cash.

Ever since the demonetisation, there is a heightened activity from industry and various arms of the government has been active in promoting digital payments. Industry-led by banks and fintech ecosystem has built a range of mobile-enabled digital payment platforms/products such wallets, BHIM-UPI, BHIM-Aadhaar, BharatQR to enable asset light merchant acceptance infrastructure, expanded merchant base in addition to catering to the surge in demand of card-accepting PoS machines. The government had undertaken a massive awareness program Digidhan soon after demonetisation and had also set up National Digital Payments Mission to promote, oversee the sustainable growth of digital payments. Various ministries are also adopting digital payments in their functioning. It also aided behavioural shift through cashback, incentivisation schemes, some specifically targeted at merchants, reimbursement of card processing charges for smaller merchants and even has in principle proposed a 20% discount on the GST. It has remained light touch on the regulation by not setting up the regulator even after 18 months of announcing the same.

The paper will analyse how the efforts of industry and government have been met by the merchant and look at factors which can and cannot be changed with policy interventions and real scope of digital payments in the merchant ecosystem.

Titiksha Vashist

Byung-Chul Han in his celebrated book “In the Swarm” warns us of the dangers of the mob that is increasingly replacing the ‘crowd’ or collective which constituted the mass of politics. He states that no true politics is possible in the digital era, where online communities lack a sense of spirit, a “we” that is now a swarm of individuals. Despite his theoretical brilliance, Han forgets that he cannot talk of the digital, the online without the offline. Politics has occurred, and continues to exist in the offline space, using the internet to spread its wings. It is not the online as-is, which has become the subject of philosophy, politics, art and aesthetics that characterises itself alone, sealed off as a space where events occur, identities formed and movements created. It is in fact, the offline that brings the online into being and gives it a myriad of meaning. While access, priviledge, commerce and capital are major themes while discussing internet access, we must not forget that the online is not merely a question of choice or access- but one that is often carefully disabled on purpose to control the offline. In India as well as other parts of the world, the internet has been interrupted for long durations to exercise political control and power, often crippling populations. According to a report by the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC), an organisation that keeps a track on internet shutdowns in the country, India has seen 244 shutdowns in 2012, of which 108 have been enforced on 2018 alone. These have been concentrated in areas such as Jammu and Kashmir and the North-East, and in instances of violence and resistance as well.

An internet shutdown is the digital equivalent of a curfew, and its application raises questions regarding its cause, uses and political intent. The internet as means, as an enabler of political action is seen as threatening, given the shift in the way people today communicate with one another. Internet bans and shutdowns are not only matters of commerce, but also pose the question of politics to understand when and how power is exercised. An offline created out of a shutdown is different- it is curated on purpose and calls for alternative means by which functionalities of daily life, resistance, capital and media occur. This essay aims to explore how the political image of the “sovereign” also enters the digital space to carefully construct, cut- off and marginalized voices, all in the name of state security, and law and order. According to philosopher Carl Schmitt, the sovereign is he who decides on the exception, and the offline is increasingly becoming a space of exception where those who control the digital can influence the political in real time. In this context, how do we understand the relationship of power and digital access? This essay focuses on three broad questions: (a) Is there a community online capable of political action that is facilitated by the internet? (b) How does power function in internet shutdowns and are they threats to democratic freedom of expression? And finally, (c) How do we begin to unpack the ‘online’ and the ‘offline’ in such a context?

Dr. Yenn Lee

Online consequences of being offline: A gendered tale from South Korea

We hear numerous anecdotes of people facing the consequences of their online activity when offline. Some have lost jobs, have been disciplined in school, or have wound up in court for what they have posted online. However, in comparison, there has been somewhat limited discussion of the reverse scenario, where going about one's day-to-day life offline leads to violations of one's online self.

This essay is concerned with a new and unparalleled phenomenon in South Korea, locally termed molka. Literally meaning 'hidden camera', molka refers to the genre of women being filmed in the least expected of situations, including cubicles in public restrooms and in the midst of car accidents, and the footage being traded and consumed as entertainment. This is distinct from revenge porn or cyber-stalking where the perpetrators usually target a known or pre-determined individual with the intention of humiliating them or to exercise control. The subjects of molka are victimised for merely existing offline and are mostly unaware that their privacy has been violated until they are recognised by someone who knows them and informs them (or inflicts further harm). In response to the rising trend of molka, tens of thousands of frustrated and infuriated women have staged monthly protest rallies in central Seoul since May 2018, urging government intervention. Ironically, women gathered offline to protest against molka have been subjected to further molka crimes with unconsented photos of themselves at the rallies surfacing online and many have been the target of misogynous attacks.

Informed by the author's multi-year ethnographic study of technologically mediated and heightened tensions in contemporary South Korean society, this essay provides a succinct yet contextualised account of the molka phenomenon. With particular attention to the ways in which the phenomenon has developed while shifting between offline and online realms, the essay demonstrates the gendered nature of digital privacy and harassment, and the broader implications of this Korean phenomenon for women in other parts of the world.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/essays-on-offline-selected-abstracts

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Deva Prasad M - 'Studying the Internet Discourse in India through the Prism of Human Rights'

Dibyajyoti Ghosh - 'Indic Scripts and the Internet'

Divij Joshi - 'The Internet in the Indian Judicial Imagination'

Ipsita Sengupta

Laird Brown - 'Dharamsala Networked'

Maitrayee Deka - 'WhatsApp Economy'

Purbasha Auddy - 'Citizens and their Internet'

Sailen Routray - 'The Many Lives and Sites of Internet in Bhubaneswar'

Sarah McKeever - 'Quantity over Quality: Social Media and the New Class System in India'

Smarika Kumar - 'Governing Speech on the Internet: Transforming the Public Sphere through Policymaking'

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Call for Essays: Offline

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We invite abstracts for essays that explore social, economic, cultural, political, infrastructural, or aesthetic dimensions of the "offline". Please submit the abstracts by Sunday, September 02.

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Essays on 'Offline' - Selected Abstracts

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